PTSD Combat

Ryan Nieto

Ryan Nieto - Grant knew her boyfriend was a veteran of the Iraq war. A Marine, he went in with the first wave of troops in 2003 and served six months there. But Grant got to know him after his deployment as a fellow college student in Ventura, Calif. They both got interested in rock climbing, and as the relationship got more serious, decided to move to Boulder and live together. Last year, Nieto began to have trouble sleeping and realized he was depressed, He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

I've begun a long overdue updating of the Upcoming Events listings. You'll find the full list by scrolling down and looking in the middle column on this page, just under the Considerable Quotes section.

WASHINGTON, June 9, 1999 - President Clinton and DoD announced June 7 two new Defense Department initiatives aimed at improving the mental health of service members. The first, called the "combat stress control" program, seeks to help identify and manage stress during deployments before it adversely impacts service members' coping skills and effectiveness. The second initiative, aimed at suicide prevention, will take the existing Air Force suicide prevention pilot program and expand it throughout DoD by the end of this year. The Air Force program has been particularly successful, achieving a 50 percent reduction in suicides in only three years. The president announced the initiatives in conjunction with the first-ever White House Conference on Mental Health, held June 7 at Washington's Howard University and chaired by Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President Al Gore. The president and Mrs. Clinton also participated in the all-day conference aimed at reducing the stigma associated with mental health disease and treatment and improving care throughout the nation.

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.