Received the following from the Department of Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine seeking candidates for a study.

A VA psychiatrist hospitalized Juneman but never notified the National Guard unit of his patient's distress over redeployment. Juneman was released that month, then missed follow-up appointments. In early March 2008, Juneman hanged himself in his Pullman apartment. His body was discovered some 20 days later, The Spokesman-Review newspaper reported. His death underscores an unsettling new reality for VA health-care providers. Unlike in decades past, they now often treat veterans headed back to war. And this can pose an ethical challenge for VA doctors if they think PTSD, traumatic brain injury or other unhealed wounds could put a patient or others at greater risk on the front line.

A whole range of programs are springing up across the country, pairing returning troops and veterans with the great outdoors.

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 real thrill tonight to have a turn as a guest poster for the Netroots For The Troops [on facebook] series over at Daily Kos. NFTT is a collaborative of online bloggers who came together at last years' Netroots Nation Convention, having collected donations and purchased needed care package items in advance, to pack boxes and ship them to soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. By all accounts, it was a smashing success. So why mess with success?

Building upon some of the data-rich news clips shared earlier this week, a few more grafs to consider.

Ryan Kohlheim began looking for answers. He and his family sifted through every stitch of his brother's clothing, Kohlheim said, looking for a letter, a note, anything that could tell them why a decorated Indiana National Guardsman barely home from a recent tour in Iraq would take his own life.

Last month, the perennially self-important showbiz legend-in-his-own-mind Stephen Colbert went to Iraq at the behest of the USO, setting out to both entertain the troops and the folks back home by taping a week's worth of Colbert Report shows.

She said it was the weight of post-traumatic stress from these and other incidents that caused her 46-year-old husband to mentally collapse last September. That's when he went on a shooting spree that began in their mobile home at Terrible's Lakeside RV Park and Casino in Pahrump and ended after a pre-dawn gunbattle with Nye County sheriff's deputies. Lamoureux was wounded and surrendered. He has been charged with multiple felony counts of attempted murder with use of a deadly weapon. His preliminary hearing is expected to be held next month in Nye County Justice Court in Pahrump.

A look at the militarization of neuroscience, giving a brief history as well as a peek at possible future outcomes of the mushrooming relationship

The test case for the use of calmatives or other chemicals as a less-than-lethal means in military operations was the 2002 Moscow Theater incident, where the Russian military employed a fentanyl derivative to kill Chechen terrorists who had taken several hundred civilians hostage. Overdoses of the calmative also caused many civilians casualties. Critics questioned not only whether the use of fentanyl against terrorists was ethical but also whether using the chemical agent violated the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The use of calmative agents in warfare would challenge the CWC, and because they manipulate human consciousness, calmatives could also pose threats to fundamental human rights, including freedom of thought. The questions raised by the Moscow Theater incident, however, have not stopped research into calmatives.

During World War II, the scientific field was atomic physics. Afraid that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, the U.S. government mounted its own crash project to get there first. The Manhattan Project was so secret that Congress did not know what it was funding and Vice President Harry S. Truman did not learn about it until FDR's death made him president. In this situation of extreme secrecy, there was almost no ethical or political debate about the Bomb before it was dropped on two cities by a bureaucratic apparatus on autopilot.

Prozasin is already used to treat high blood pressure, and has been helpful in improving sleep and reducing the incidence of nightmares for military veterans who have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). People who have Alzheimer's disease, depression, PTSD, and schizophrenia have higher levels of glucocorticoids in their blood serum. Researchers believe that stress causes a neurochemial response in our body and our brain. This neurochemical response causes the release of glucocorticoids in our brains.

In a conversation today with Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of the Army's Combined Arms Center in Leavenworth, Kans., we learned that the Army is getting all Wiki on us. Basically Caldwell is embracing the Web 2.0 phenomenon of making reference material available online in an easily updatable fashion by creating so-called Wiki pages based on the popular Wikipedia online reference source.

Currently, there are a number of bills before Congress that would benefit veterans with PTSD and their families. Additionally, the military is expanding its effort to increase outreach to soldiers with PTSD.

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.

I'll begin occasionally saving and sharing some of the facts and figures I stumble upon during my research that I'd like to ferret away. Welcome to the first dose of random Combat Clips.

As of 2007, the Military Health System had recorded 43,779 patients with traumatic brain injuries from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It had recorded 39,365 patients with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to a Department of Defense report to Congress. By the end of September 2008, the number of patients with a preliminary diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from Veterans Affairs doctors had risen to 101,882 - more than 10 percent of veterans who have left the military and more than 20 percent of those who have gone to Veterans Affairs for medical treatment, according to a spokeswoman for Veterans Affairs.

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.

While most in Washington have been busily paying attention to the Sotomayor hearings this week, the Senate Veterans Affairs' Committee met Tuesday morning to consider the quality of VA care provided to our nation's 1.8 million female veterans.