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"An Air Force Reserve 403rd Wing "Hurricane Hunters" WC-130J is scheduled to depart May 19 as the military's first-ever media flight compromised solely of bloggers. This flight gives bloggers from across the country an opportunity only available to traditional media outlets until now. Members from the international blogging community will be able to share with their audiences what it is like to ride with the Hurricane Hunters while learning what goes into training for one of the most challenging missions in the Air Force. Immediately after their flight, bloggers will be able to update their sites in an adjacent computer room. The two-hour flight over the Gulf of Mexico will give a new audience a better understanding of how the Hurricane Hunters collect life-saving data inside storms and highlighting the coming hurricane season which starts June 1. According to a Pentagon survey, 94% of people born after 1990 actively either blog or use social networking, such as Facebook, and new media ranks number two behind television on how people receive information. The Air Force Reserve and the 403rd are pioneers when it comes to embracing new media and are proud to offer this opportunity to the blogging community. "Social Networking and blogging is not the communication of the future, but of today. This is the way current generations communicate and the Air Force and Air Force Reserve needs to keep up with how technology is evolving and making communication faster and easier," said Brigadier General James J. Muscatell, Jr., commander of the 403rd Wing. This flight is another example of how the 403rd is communicating through new media, the Wing mission that includes the maintainers, the Hurricane Hunters and the Flying Jennies. The public can keep up with news about the 403rd Wing via Facebook Groups listed under '403rd Wing', 'AF Reserve Hurricane Hunters', '815th Flying Jennies' and '41st APS'. In addition, full-resolution photos can be found u

"In Changing the Organizational Culture, his article in Small Wars Journal, Caldwell writes that it's time for the Army to rethink its approach to the new media. Caldwell has some experience here: he was the person you saw in the Baghdad press conferences last year, speaking for the Multi-National Force [MNF, as he refers to it below]. Wherever you stand (or stood) on the war, what he's saying here bears reading, as he's proposing a new approach: Recent experiences in Iraq illustrate how important it is to address cultural change and also how very difficult it is to change culture: After MNF-I broke through the bureaucratic red-tape and was able to start posting on YouTube, MNF-I videos from Iraq were among the top ten videos viewed on YouTube for weeks after their posting. These videos included gun tape videos showing the awesome power the US military can bring to bear. Using YouTube - part of the new media - proved to be an extremely effective tool in countering an adaptive enemy."

Researchers are now starting to understand the physiological origins of this cognitive "fog of war", finding that the severity of soldiers' symptoms correlates with the levels of various hormones and neurotransmitters. This work has revealed why some soldiers manage to keep their head amid the chaos while others are clouded in confusion, and it has even suggested drugs and supplements which could one day help all troops to think more clearly under fire. Such intervention might also reduce the number of lives - like Wells's - that have been shattered by post-traumatic stress disorder, since it seems soldiers who experience the greatest cognitive disturbance during combat are most likely to suffer subsequently from PTSD. Although war leaves its mark on almost every combatant (see "Battle lines drawn in the brain"), drugs that clear the mental fog during battle might significantly reduce the severity of the symptoms that linger long after the soldiers have returned home. "If we understand the physiology, that gives us clues as to where and how we might intervene," suggests Charles "Andy" Morgan, a psychiatrist at Yale University and the US Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD in West Haven, Connecticut.

Date / Length: 7/14/2009 10:30 PM UTC - 30 min Description: h:34685 s:607634 Lindy Kyzer, strategist with the Army's Online and Social Media Division, will join us to discuss how the U.S. Army is implementing social media to better tell the Army Story.

U.S. military veterans from three decades pass through Judge Sarah Smith's courtroom here, reporting on their battles with drug addiction, alcoholism and despair. Those who find jobs and stabilize their lives are rewarded with candy bars and applause. Those who backslide go to jail. Smith radiates an air of maternal care from the bench. As the veterans come before her, she softly asks: "How are you doing? Do you need anything?" But if a veteran fails random drug tests, she doesn't flinch at invoking his sentence. Her court is part of a new approach in the criminal justice system: specialized courts for veterans who have broken the law. Judges have been spurred by a wave of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, battling post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries and stumbling into trouble with the law. But advocates of the courts say they also address a problem as old as combat itself. "Some families give their sons or daughters to service for their country, and they're perfectly good kids. And they come back from war and just disintegrate before our eyes," said Robert Alvarez, a counselor at Fort Carson in Colorado who is advocating for a veterans court in the surrounding county. "Is it fair to put these kids in prison because they served and got injured?"

A lot of soldiers say war is hell, and then, they won't say anything else. That wasn't good enough for one west suburban playwright. She's created a new collaboration called the Vet Art Project. It brings veterans and artists together to make art out of war. The group's vision is a big one: it aims to be a national model for how veterans can tell their stories and get the public to listen.

"This is the week that Society for Neuroscience members spread throughout America to speak about the exciting wonders of the mind," Sestak said. But, he added, they also take the time to engage us on issues having not only to do with neuroscience, but also on how to care for patients who suffer damage, such as traumatic brain injury.

Pfc. Jordan May, a 26-year-old gunner, fell into a deep sleep that night and never woke up. In the six years since the war in Iraq began, it's been standard practice to honor troops who die overseas as patriots. But for the families of May and other Fort Hood soldiers who died on post or close to home, there typically are no news reports and no flags lowered to half-staff. The hidden demons that follow troops home - mental stress, depression and traumatic brain injury, to name a few - don't always go away. When left unresolved, they can lead to divorce, drug or alcohol abuse and suicide. And as the March 19 anniversary of the start of the war draws near, there are more questions than answers in the stateside deaths of May and 13 other Fort Hood troops in the past eight months. The Army typically releases general details of how a soldier has died in Iraq, usually from small-arms fire, an explosive, an accident or an unspecified noncombat incident. But when a soldier dies at Fort Hood, friends and relatives often can only speculate about any role the war might have played.

First Lady Michelle Obama paid a visit to Soldiers and family members at Fort Bragg in what was her first tour outside the White House. During her visit, Obama said she was inspired by the spirit of the Fort Bragg community and said she was fully committed to improving support to all military families.

"If you're curious about how crisis workers, journalists, and soldiers overcome the specific stress of working in war and disaster zones, there is a rapidly growing family of resources. Here's a story for you. On combat PTSD, you may have seen Ilona Meagher's PTSD Combat Blog"

What exactly is a "mental disorder"? For that matter, what criteria should determine whether any condition is a "disease" or a "disorder"? Is "disease" something like an oak tree-a physical object you can bump into or put your arms around? Or are terms like "disease" and "disorder" merely abstract, value-laden constructs, akin to "injustice" and "immorality"? Are categories of disease and disorder fundamentally different in psychiatry than in other medical specialties? And-by the way-how do the terms "disease," "disorder," "syndrome," "malady," "sickness," and "illness" differ? Anyone who believes there are easy or certain answers to these questions is either in touch with the Divine Mind, or out of touch with reality. To appreciate the complexity and ambiguity in this conceptual arena, consider this quote from the venerable Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry: "The term 'mental illness' is probably best used for those disorders that are intuitively most like bodily illness (or disease) and, yet, mental rather than bodily. This of course implies everything that is built into the mind-brain problem!"1(p11) In a single sentence, we are already grappling with the terms "illness," "disorder," and "disease," not to mention Cartesian psychology! And yet-daunting though these issues are-they are central to the practical task now before the DSM-V committees: figuring out what conditions ought to be included as psychiatric disorders.

Military families throughout TRICARE's west region now have a new way to learn about their health care benefits through the movies. ... "TRICARE 2 You" video topics, which run an average of three minutes in a prime-time news format, include explanations of TRICARE plan options, how to access specialty care, behavioral health resources, pharmacy options and newborn enrollment, among others. "We wanted to do whatever it takes to help our beneficiaries maximize use of their TRICARE benefit and avoid out-of-pocket costs," said David J. McIntyre, president and CEO of TriWest Healthcare Alliance. "This is especially useful for service members, particularly those in the National Guard and Reserve who live or work in rural areas without convenient access to military base resources," he said. Produced by TriWest, in partnership with TRICARE Regional Office-West, the videos are housed in the company's new "TRICARE 2 You Online Library" at www.triwest.com/T2U.

In Maj. Thomas Jarrett's stress management class surrounded by concrete blast walls, American troops are urged not to accept post-traumatic stress disorder as an inevitable consequence of war. Instead, Jarrett tells them to strive for "post-traumatic growth." During a 90-minute presentation entitled "Warrior Resilience and Thriving," Jarrett, a former corporate coach, offers this and other unconventional tips on how troops can stay mentally healthy once they return home. He quotes Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Paradise Lost author John Milton and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, among others. Walking through the crowd of young GIs in the makeshift classroom, Jarrett urges them to fight their "internal insurgents."

As advances in neuroscience bring all this into the realms of reality, there are ethical issues to consider. Last week, the NAS released a report assessing the military potential of neuroscience, providing a rare insight into how the military might invest its money to create future armies. Sponsored by the US army and written by a panel of 14 prominent neuroscientists, the report focuses on those areas with "high-payoff potential" - where the science is sufficiently reliable to turn into useful technologies (see "Where should the money go?").

"A former prison guard at the Anchorage Jail who was threatened by a convicted murderer intoxicated on hair spray and armed with a sharpened pencil deserves workers' compensation for mental injury, the Alaska Supreme Court has ruled. Carl Kelly, 60, suffered psychological health problems, maybe even post-traumatic stress disorder, from the 1994 confrontation, the court said. The decision makes it clear that in mental health workers' compensation cases, it is not the event itself that matters and whether what happened is considered part of the job, but how the event is perceived by the individual. "It's very significant," said longtime claimants attorney Chancy Croft, who was not involved in the case. "It makes it clear that the effect on the individual is important.""