Word: mentally
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...medical parlance it is known as "secondary trauma," and it can afflict the families of soldiers who suffer from PTSD along with the health workers who are trying to help those soldiers. Dr. Antoinette Zeiss, deputy chief of Mental Health Services for Veterans Affairs, while not wishing to talk about the specific case of the Fort Hood slayings, told TIME that "anyone who works with PTSD clients and hears their stories will be profoundly affected...
...Most Army psychiatrists now have a full caseload of men and women returning from combat zones with PTSD. A survey by the Rand Corp. in April revealed that 1 in 5 service men and women are coming back with posttraumatic stress and mental depression. Previously known as "combat fatigue" or being "shell-shocked," PTSD was only diagnosed as an illness in the 1980s, but it has been around for as long as men have been killing one another and undergoing fearful experiences. It can lead to outbursts of rage, emotional numbness, severe depression, nightmares and the abuse of alcohol...
Soldiers nursing the mental and emotional scars of war have overwhelmed the central Texas base, the Army's largest. Cases of posttraumatic stress disorder quadrupled from 2005 to 2007, and PTSD affects even those - like Hasan - who haven't gone off to war. "Mental-health issues are a real problem for the Fort Hood population," an Army study concluded last year. "Soldiers don't live in a vacuum," it added, noting that they have "families and friends who are also affected by the trauma the soldiers experience...
Hasan had spent six years dealing with the mental wreckage of war at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and, since July, at Fort Hood's Darnall Army Medical Center. His own susceptibility to mental problems was likely heightened because he was pretty much a loner: he wasn't married or in a relationship. After his parents died a decade ago, he seemed to become more religious. Absent close family, he spent much of his time counseling soldiers whose minds and bodies were scarred in combat. (See pictures of U.S. troops' six years in Iraq...
...wars could have deepened because of his constant contact with soldiers suffering from PTSD, that 2008 Army study suggested. More broadly, an Army study released in July found that major crimes have been on the rise at U.S. Army bases since 2003. It noted that crime rates - and mental illnesses - are rising with increased deployments and casualties...