Just a quick note to observe an anniversary in passing. This blog turned three at the end of February. Almost 600 posts in three years, on the various therapeutic issues and considerations for treating combat trauma and PTSD.
When we started this blog / website three years ago, there seriously wasn't much attention being paid to this topic. There was information out there, but you had to really look for it. And much of it was "legacy" information, relating to combat veterans of previous wars -- as though the problem could also be relegated to the past, and not the present. Yet as one Marine officer said, on his return from Iraq, "Frankly, we will be dealing with the human casualties [here] for the remainder of our professional lives."
Today, fortunately, the tide has been turning. There's greater public awareness of the problem of PTSD, and an increasingly compassionate sense, especially over the last several months, that we not neglect veterans after they've served their country. More grass-roots efforts are starting up, and organizations here and there (Give an Hour, Yoga for Vets, etc.) are encouraging their members to donate services to deserving veterans and their families.
Three years later, the landscape is changing. Just since the beginning of this year, we've seen generals begin to speak up about the reality of PTSD in their own experience -- something that would have been unthinkable, even three years ago. Yet the number of suicides among recent combat veterans and deployed servicemembers continues to increase, joining with the astronomical number of Vietnam veterans who have and continue to take their lives. So the problem, as such, is far from over; far from solved. Indeed, we are just beginning to pay the type of attention we need to in order to make some progress. Veterans still have misgivings about the type of care they're receiving at the hands of the VA, and while this has improved some in recent years, stories about the shredding of claims, etc. continue to underscore the need for much greater, wholesale change to the organization. And the VA, while theoretically open to other solutions, continues to rely on pharmaceuticals and talk therapy as the "gold standard" of treatment, and yet boasts very few "success stories" based on this model. Lasting success stories, we should clarify...
Going forward, two things are certain. One is that the "need" -- the demand for services -- will only continue to grow, and most likely, dramatically so, over the next few years and continue for years to come. The other is that there is no obvious "treatment" that seems to work from within the confines of mainstream medicine and psychiatry. There are ways to improve the problem -- suppress the symptoms, temporarily -- but not really to "solve it -- heal the patient -- in any more thorough-going, comprehensive way. Or so it would seem. Unless and until you start thinking outside the box, and taking a look at what else is out there. It'll be interesting to see what the future holds. The "demand" -- combat veterans who need help -- is huge; the "supply" -- treatments that work, really work, and don't do more harm than good -- are few and far between. We've done our best to cover what those are, to give combat veterans and their loved ones hope. We'll continue to do so, this year and beyond.
If you want to know more about the problem, read the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA)'s special mental health report, released at the end of January, entitled "Invisible Wounds: Psychological and Neurological Injuries Confront a New Generation of Veterans," That report, in PDF form, is linked here.
