Group items tagged

"An army hospital in Tacoma, Wash. is under fire for reneging on mental health care for troops diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Since 2007, more than 300 soldiers under consideration for medical retirement because of PTSD had their diagnoses reversed by a screening team at Madigan Army Medical Center -- a move criticized for putting costs before care. "Over 40 percent of those service members who walked in the door with a PTSD diagnosis had their diagnosis changed to something else or overturned entirely," Sen. Patty Murray said at a Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing Wednesday. "In light of all the tragedies we have seen that stem from the untreated, invisible wounds of war, I'm sure that you would agree that this is very concerning." PTSD is an anxiety disorder brought on by a traumatic event. The symptoms -- from anger and hypervigilance to numbness and avoidance, not to mention recurrent nightmares and terrifying flashbacks -- can wreak havoc on a person's personal and professional life. A 2010 study by Walter Reed Army Institute of Research found up to 30 percent of Iraq war veterans have symptoms of PTSD. The diagnosis can cost taxpayers as much as $1.5 million per soldier, according to an Army Medical Command memo obtained by the Seattle Times. "The challenges of PTSD and mental health care are real. And no one -- no one -- should be denying any service member purely because of a question of cost," said Murray. "That is something the tax payers of this country bear the burden of providing. We will provide it." Madigan is currently under investigation by the U.S. Army Medical Command for the reversed diagnoses. But Murray argued the investigation should be military-wide. "I want to make sure that we are really looking not just at Madigan… but system-wide," she said, adding that cost should not stand in the way of soldiers getting "the care that they have earned and they deserve and that this country expects them to have." Army

"Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs of Baltimore, came across the accident by chance: A car had smashed into a pickup truck loaded with metal pipes. Mitchell tried to help, but he saw at once that he was too late. The car had rear-ended the truck at high speed, sending a pipe through the windshield and into the chest of the passenger-a young bride returning home from her wedding. There was blood everywhere, staining her white dress crimson. Mitchell couldn't get the dead woman out of his mind; the tableau was stuck before his eyes. He tried to tough it out, but after months of suffering, he couldn't take it anymore. He finally told his brother, a fellow firefighter, about it. Miraculously, that worked. No more trauma; Mitchell felt free. This dramatic recovery, along with the experiences of fellow first responders, led Mitchell to do some research into recovery from trauma. He eventually concluded that he had stumbled upon a powerful treatment. In 1983, nearly a decade after the car accident, Mitchell wrote an influential paper in the Journal of Emergency Medical Services that transformed his experience into a seven-step practice, which he called critical incident stress debriefing, or CISD. The central idea: People who survive a painful event should express their feelings soon after so the memory isn't "sealed over" and repressed, which could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. In recent years, CISD has become exceedingly popular, used by the US Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Israeli army, the United Nations, and the American Red Cross. Each year, more than 30,000 people are trained in the technique. (After the September 11 attacks, 2,000 facilitators descended on New York City.) Even though PTSD is triggered by a stressful incident, it is really a disease of memory. The problem isn't the trauma-it's that the trauma can't be forgotten. Most memories, and their associated emotion

"Researchers led by New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux recently claimed to be the first scientists to erase a single memory. Working with rats, LeDoux's team first taught the animals to fear both a beep and a siren by giving them an electric shock every time either of the tones sounded. Then LeDoux gave half the rats the drug U0126, which is known to interfere with memory storage, and replayed the beep without electric shocks. A day later, when LeDoux played back both tones to the rats, the animals that hadn't been given the drug were still fearful of both sounds. But the rats that had been given the memory-blocking drug weren't afraid of the beep, which they had last heard while under the influence of U0126. advertisement | article continues below Click here! Exactly how U0126 exerts its amnesiac effect is unknown, but it may block the synthesis of proteins that help strengthen connections between neurons and establish memories. The opportunity for erasure occurs during the act of retrieving a memory because that's when the memory is being updated and stabilized again for long-term storage. "Only those memories that are activated are vulnerable," LeDoux says. Drugs like U0126 may someday help sufferers of traumatic memories. A small group of human studies have been done on a drug called propranolol, which blocks the action of stress neurotransmitters that help cement memories in the brain, but LeDoux's work shows the potential for greater precision. "You might be able to reduce the traumatic impact of memories in people with PTSD," says LeDoux. "The good news is you wouldn't be erasing their memory bank." "

"It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007-from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling-a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created. A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were "anxiety disorders," including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); "mood disorders," including major depression and bipolar disorders; "impulse-control disorders," including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and "substance use disorders," including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment-up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier. Nowadays treatment by medical doctors nearly always means psychoactive drugs, that is, drugs that affect the mental state. In fact, most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from "talk therapy" to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coin