Word: ptsd
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...with his particularly bleak view of the future. "It's a tough war we're in. It's not going to be over right away. There's going to be other wars," he told supporters on Sunday, without elaborting. "And right now-we're gonna have a lot of PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] to treat, my friends...We're gonna have a lot of combat wounds that have to do with these terrible explosive IEDs that inflict such severe wounds...
When veterans of America's two current wars - Iraq and Afghanistan - tried to sue the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to process thousands of claims for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the Department waved them off saying they had no right to do so. The VA said that Congress had set up an administrative - not judicial - process for evaluating individual disability claims. The veterans, it declared, just had to wait for bureaucracy to take its course - no matter that it has a backlog of 600,000 unresolved claims, each of which can take up to six months or more...
...veterans organizations). Nor is that bureaucratic process empowered to grant the kind of relief sought by the veterans groups: systemic changes in the VA's processing of disability claims, strengthened rights of individual veterans to press their claims and immediate medical and psychological help for returning troops complaining of PTSD symptoms...
...suit claims that the VA violates the constitutional rights of PTSD victims by denying them medical care and benefits as well as the power to hire outside attorneys and obtain records in their disability petitions. Proponents of the suit point out that the VA's immense backlog of claims leads to delays in treatment, often compounding PTSD symptoms, contributing to substance abuse and suicide...
...veterans of the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars, the suit says, at least 15% suffer from PTSD, an emotional illness characterized by nightmares, memory loss and irritability. The VA's failure to provide treatment - only 27 of the nation's 1,400 VA hospitals have programs dedicated to PTSD - has led to an "epidemic of suicides" by returning troops, said Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense, the lead plaintiff group...