Frank Discussion About PTSD and War Trauma

Frank Discussion About PTSD and War Trauma (VIDEO)
Tim King and Dr. Phil Leveque Salem-News.com
Two men with experience in war; one a combat soldier and physician, and one who is a present day war reporter, attempt to spread light on facts surrounding PTSD.

(SALEM, Ore.) - As increasing numbers of veterans are returning from war where they experienced direct combat situations, the number of questions about what that trauma will bring them later in life is growing too.

Dr. Phil Leveque is a WWII veteran and a physician. When he speaks about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he does so from what may be one of the most unique and qualified perspectives possible.

First he survived combat and battle injuries fighting Hitler's Nazi soldiers while the world raged at war, then he endured the hardships of the government VA healthcare system where he spent several months recovering from combat related injuries.

After that Phillip Leveque, already a college graduate, completed his master's program and attended medical school. He became a doctor who specialized in the treatment of people who had endured similar horrors of war.

Tim King joined the Marine Corps after high school, and then began a career in news broadcasting in the late 1980's. Today in addition to writing and reporting for Salem-News.com full time, he also serves as a War Correspondent.

Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 in Afghanistan embedded with the 41st Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. Army which was under the control of the Oregon Guard.

In late March, Tim will head to Baghdad, Iraq to cover the actions of Oregon National Guard soldiers on the ground.
click post title for the rest and video

I will embed the video soon.

Wounded Times blog on fire, thank you

Wounded Times
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Thank you so much.

These are the top videos.

Coming Out of The Dark of PTSD
1241 views
45 downloads


Death Because They Served PTSD Suicides
1765 views
22 downloads


Hero After War Combat Vets and PTSD
8551 views
59 downloads


PTSD After Trauma
2321 views
106 downloads


When War Comes Home PTSD
4126 views
65 downloads


Wounded Minds PTSD and Veterans
8445 views
194 downloads

Thank you all for coming here to read my blog. It is a testament of your desire to know more. I am a person of limited technical knowledge when it comes to blogging. As a matter of fact, I'm so bad at it that I messed up my feed on my other blog to the point where it dropped from 10,000 hits at week to five. It has been fixed since then, but now you get the point of how much I do appreciate the readers who do come here.

I spend about 12 hours a day on line doing this work, reading, researching and answering a ton of emails. Having you come here, makes it all worth the time and work. My goal is to reach as many people as possible so that they never feel alone in any of this the way I and my family did in the beginning. Together we can remove the stigma and provide knowledge to support the families out there just like mine, and probably like your's. We can fight to make changes in the VA and DOD systems so that the veterans who need help will get it instead of ending their own lives feeling hopeless. We are making a difference. It doesn't matter how many posts I put up a day or how many videos I make if no one comes. I search for information to share because I remember how it felt to not know where to even begin to look.

As this site and the videos may inform you or lighten the burden you carry, please pass on the work so that it may help others as well.

Thank you all again with all my heart.


Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington

Billy Joel's Christmas in Fallujah sales to be donated to Home For Our Troops

Net proceeds generated from downloads of "Christmas in Fallujah" will be donated to Home for Our Troops, a nonprofit that builds specially adapted homes for severely disabled veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Billy Joel in Iraq State of Mind
by Josh Grossberg
Fri, 7 Dec 2007 12:29:43 PM PST

Billy Joel took on the Vietnam War in "Goodnight Saigon." Now the Piano Man has emerged from semiretirement to tackle Iraq.

Sort of.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer's latest single, "Christmas in Fallujah," premiered Tuesday on iTunes Dec. 4.

But not only is the track pianoless, it's also devoid of Joel's vocals. Instead, the pop legend has passed singing duties to Cass Dillon, a 21-year-old upstart singer-songwriter from his native Long Island.

On his Website, Joel said the song was inspired by letters he received from soldiers who have taken solace in his tunes during their tours in the war-torn country. He combined their sentiments with his own impressions of the battle.

"We came with the crusaders to save the Holy Land," goes one verse. "It's Christmas in Fallujah, and no one gives a damn."

click post title for the rest

I used his song "Goodnight Saigon" for my video Nam Nights Of PTSD Still because it was such a powerful reminder of what the Vietnam veterans went through. They are still fighting a battle against the enemy in their minds. As with all wars, some came home fine, but others came home with Vietnam hitching a ride. With all the focus on the newest generation of warriors, we cannot forget the Vietnam veterans in any of this, or any combat veteran. The Vietnam vets paved the way for what has been done with PTSD so far and we have a very long way to go. They reach back to make sure no one has to battle any of this on their own and to make sure no one comes home feeling alone the way they did. To me, the Vietnam veterans are the greatest generation.
You can watch the video on the right side of the blog or go here
Nam Nights Of PTSD Still
9 min - Nov 17, 2007
PTSD Still...Vietnam Vets are being pushed to the back of the line with the new veterans needing so much help. We need to help all of
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3981582536481542706

New PTSD group at YouTube

Speaking out on PTSD
PTSD is a wound. No one would be ashamed of a bullet wound. Why be ashamed of this wound? End the silence and break the stigma. More than you know suffer from this wound. Trauma is Greek for wound.
Tags:
ptsd post traumatic stress combat wound soldiers veteran Created: November 27, 2007Videos: 8 Members: 1 Discussions: 0 You are the owner of this group. Member since November 27, 2007

I set up this group for people to share PTSD videos (not just mine but I am pushing mine since I spend a couple of weeks just putting them together) because the more we focus on PTSD, share, learn from each other, the weaker the stigma gets. It is to support each other. If you plan on going in there and attacking anyone, I zap you out of the group faster than you can remember your password. This group is for us, the families and for the veterans, or anyone who has PTSD. It is to learn and support. Feel free to pass this on. All are welcome as long as you can remember compassion.

When War Comes Home Part Two

New video on PTSD. Someone asked if I could put up a video for the new generation of wounded with country music. I'll admit when it comes to any kind of newer music, I know very little of any of it. I asked a few friends for some suggestions. Toby Keith came up the most. I used Yesterday's Rain and My List for the songs on this one. I tried to use more from Afghanistan, since that occupation usually gets forgotten about and wanted to include some of the troops from other nations as well. We cannot forget that none of the nations finding it necessary to send them into combat, never seem to manage to anticipate any of them getting wounded. It's up to us to make sure they take care of the men and women they send. This isn't political because on this, no one is off the hook. Pro-war or Pro-Peace, both sides claim they care about the troops. Time to prove it folks. The wounded are waiting and more join them everyday. How about calling your Congressman and telling them to take care of all of them now! Give the wounded something to actually be thankful for from this "grateful nation" and the people who pray for them everyday.

To the country music fan, I hope you like the choice. Yesterday's Rain is about the past. My List is about living now. Too many of them with PTSD are not living in the now fully. We all need to understand what this is.

Veteran Suicides, PTSD, and Election 08': DOES AMERICA CARE?

This video is over on the right side of the blog. When you watch it, understand something. We may be very interested in all of this and that's why you read this blog and why I do it. The rest of the country still doesn't get it.

Casting call for actor to portray PTSD symptoms

Audition Details
Production Title:
Video Production
Submit by: December 18, 2007
Union: Both
Sex: Both
Pay: Yes
Is this Audition for Kids & Teens (Under 18 Years old)? No
Audition Breakdown
1. Email: Male / 18-24 yrs. / White. [Others like this] The male must represent an army person.
The actor will act out Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms.
The actor will also read a poem out.
http://www.starsearchcasting.com/casting_notices/notice.php?id=96606

At first I thought this had to be a joke. With all the veterans in this country who live with PTSD everyday, why would they ever need an actor?

Nam Nights Of PTSD new video

Ever wonder why they can't sleep at night? Ever wonder why they are sitting in a chair but seem to be a long, long way from home? They remember it all. It comes back to them like ghosts flooding into the house. We've seen it with Vietnam Vets for over 30 years and we are still seeing it. While the media in general are doing a good job covering the Iraq and Afghanistan Vets, the Vietnam veterans are watching out for them as well. The problem is, no one is watching out for them except other Vietnam Vets.
Billy Joel came out with Goodnight Saigon and it had the sound of helicopters along with what they went through. One of the things they have a hard time with is the sound of helicopters. they have a hard time with fireworks and traffic jams. With being in a crowded room or having their back to the open. To this day, my husband wants a booth when we go out to dinner, among a long, long list of other things.
The DOORS came out with People Are Strange. You can't get any stranger than combat veterans. I don't mean that in a bad way, but they are strange to us. They are also very rare. They do not even make up ten percent of the population of this nation with over 300 million people but combat veterans are even more rare. It's time for us to understand them, what they are dealing with and why so many have wounds we cannot see. You can see them, but you have to really pay attention.

Watch it at the bottom of this blog along with the rest of them. You never know what you can learn.
Nam Nights Of PTSD Still from Kathleen "Costos" DiCesare on Vimeo.

Baghdad in Middle America

Baghdad in Middle America
Posted November 15, 2007 02:49 PM (EST)
Breaking News
Honoring vets means nothing at all unless it means honoring the deeply gouged personal truths each experienced during deployment. But the dismissal of such truths is as much a part of war, and its aftermath, as the propaganda and geopolitical whoppers necessary to launch it.

The problem with these individual truths is that they seldom smack of glory. More often, they're simply mundane and hellish, and slowly eat the vet's soul. The clinical name for this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and it's the phrase I heard most frequently and most distinctly this past weekend, during the grim, pained acknowledgement -- I can hardly call it celebration -- of Veterans Day.

Ray Parrish, a vets' counselor and Vietnam vet, was adamantly pessimistic as he spoke to 100 or so people gathered on a bitter, gray Sunday morning at the river in downtown Chicago, about the psychic toll our current wars are exacting on the ones who are fighting them.

Noting that the standard tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan is 15 months (three months more than Nam), that two or three tours of duty are common, and that maybe eight or nine months of continuous battle conditions -- little sleep, ever-present terror, the necessity to kill -- is about all a normal human being can take, Parrish said: "It is inevitable that every soldier is coming back with PTSD -- without exception."
Go there and read the rest


You've heard the numbers but what you don't hear are the veterans who are still silent. They suffer without saying a single word, without going to the VA, without a hand to help them heal.

Last year, after 24 years of trying to reach them, I started to do videos. There have been very few comments but a lot of downloads. I get a ton of email everyday because of this. If you wonder how bad PTSD is for them, look at these numbers. Keep in mind I am not well known. I spend too much time working on this and not enough time advertising it.


Coming Out of The Dark of PTSD
986 views
37 download
Death Because They Served PTSD Suicides
1571 views
16 download
Heal the wounds of PTSD
389 views
5 download
Hero After War Combat Vets and PTSD
4952 views
50 download
PTSD After Trauma
1914 views
96 download
PTSD Soldiers Wounded And Waiting
337 views
4 download
When War Comes Home PTSD
3014 views
53 download
Wounded Minds PTSD and Veterans
8031 views
186 download
Wounded Minds Veterans and PTSD
1579 views
39 download

The first one I did and was not the best one because I was just finding out how to do them.
Veterans and PTSD All time views:14,648

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-541446594865961835&q=kathie+costos&total=30&start=0&num=10&
so=0&type=search&plindex=4

Women At War Views: 2,523
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGTjB1ls3-k

Hero After War Views: 1,984
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zt4FTRLxGk

End The Silence of PTSD Views: 3,481
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H2zPMYd5Gs

These are just about PTSD. Do you think we have a huge problem? Most of these downloads represent groups of people watching them. They are being shown in colleges, VFW posts, American Legion Posts and other veterans groups among other places across the world. I've mailed out at least a hundred DVD's. It's time we did a hell of a lot more than saying we support the troops and start taking care of them. If everyone of the veterans with PTSD were able to go to their local senator's offices, this wound would be addressed overnight.

TriWest And Montana Veterans Administration Launch PTSD Video Conference

TriWest And Montana Veterans Administration Launch PTSD Video Conference To Reach Rural Health Care Providers

Published 09-21-2007

Community providers learn to recognize combat stress symptoms in returning troops

PHOENIX,AZ (CompNewsNetwork) - As part of their continuing efforts to address the needs of returning Guard members, TriWest Healthcare Alliance, the Department of Defense's TRICARE contractor in Montana and the VA Montana Health Care System have partnered to launch the first Combat Stress Video Conference. The conference, being held from 2 to 5 p.m. on Sept. 19, 2007, will bring together nearly 150 community-based health care providers that care for the thousands of returning Montana National Guard troops throughout the state.

The conference will be broadcast simultaneously to providers in nine locations including Billings, Culbertson, Glasgow, Glendive, Great Falls, Havre, Helena, Kalispell and Lewistown. It is intended to help rural providers identify deployment-related symptoms such as combat stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD and traumatic brain injury, as well as providing treatment methods.

The Montana National Guard consists of more than 3,700 members who live in nearly every corner of the state. Since 2001, more than 80 percent have been mobilized for active duty.

"Family practitioners and community-based health care providers are integral in helping Montana's returning National Guard troops cope with the emotional and mental health issues resulting from serving in combat," explained David J. McIntyre, President and Chief Executive Officer of TriWest Healthcare Alliance. "This video conference is the first of its kind to combine the resources of the VA and TriWest to reach rural providers caring for these service members as they reintegrate into mainstream civilian life."

"The onset of emotional or mental health symptoms is unpredictable.
click post title for the rest

PTSD Vet Of Iraq War Honored In Launch Of Foundation

Aug 30, 2007 4:27 pm US/Central
Vet Of Iraq War Honored In Launch Of Foundation (AP) Minneapolis Robert Herubin knew his friend Jonathan Schulze, after a tour of combat duty in Iraq, was on a downward spiral.

Depressed, drinking heavily and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, nobody was able to reach the troubled Marine before he killed himself in January. Herubin and others close to the Purple Heart recipient wondered what more could have been done. An answer has since emerged in the form of the Jonathan Schulze "I Can't Hear You" Foundation, which aims to pair veterans returning from combat with other veterans who have experienced war. Such a relationship might have saved Schulze, believes Herubin, himself a veteran of the first Gulf War.

"This is about these guys being able to talk to someone who's been there and done that.

Someone who knows what it's like to fight and kill," he said. Herubin came up with the foundation's name while he was at Schulze's wake. Herubin had placed a cap next to Schulze's body with the words "I Can't Hear You!" emblazoned across the front.
It's a phrase often doled out by drill instructors to their timid new recruits, but as Herubin stared into Schulze's coffin, it suddenly meant something else. "You were right there," Herubin recalled thinking, "and I couldn't hear you." The group is launching its first chapter at a VFW post in suburban Prior Lake, where Herubin first met Schulze after he returned from Iraq and a grueling tour that included door-to-door combat in the city of Fallujah. go here for the rest http://wcco.com/local/local_story_242173154.html

If you watched Death Because They Served (video at the bottom of this blog) you will see Jonathan in the video, along with over a hundred more. It took a long time to find their stories. Stories very few even want to hear, yet these men and women, so wounded by combat, could not find anyone to help them heal. Love cannot cure PTSD no more than time can. You cannot wish it away or ignore it away. Jonathan tired to get the help he needed but it wasn't there for him when he needed it. Too many have been sent away because no one bothered to prepare for these combat wounded before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq happened. History had already recorded the battle wounds of those who came from other wars, in other times and in nations around the world because history knew those who participated in combat were only humans exposed to the most horrific experiences known to man.


There are many who succeeded in committing suicide, while many more have tired. They have been redeployed tragically wounded with a boat load of pills to keep them useful, instead of healing their wounded minds. Rob Withrow is one of them. He tried to commit suicide four times but they sent him back all the same.

Broken Warrior: One soldier's struggleFirst it was the horrors of Iraq. Now, Rob Withrow is locked in a fight with his own Army superiors.
He wants mental health treatment -- they want him to face a court-martial
By CAROL SMITHP-I REPORTER

Rob Withrow was a good soldier until he got back from combat duty in Iraq.
Now by his own admission, he is no longer anyone's idea of a model fighting man. He screwed up, and he's screwed up -- an assessment the Army would agree with.



Mike Urban / P-I

U.S. Army soldier Rob Withrow, photographed among the yellow ribbons tied to the Freedom Bridge across Interstate 5 near Fort Lewis. Since his problems began, Withrow has been reduced in rank from sergeant to private.
But that's where their agreement ends.

Withrow wants mental health treatment. He has tried to commit suicide four times since returning from Iraq. He has been hospitalized in Madigan Army Medical Center's inpatient psychiatric unit on multiple occasions and is currently on a cocktail of antidepressants and psychoactive drugs. He is a month out of treatment for an addiction to narcotic pain pills that he began taking to "numb out" the month he returned from Iraq and he does not fit the Army's new criteria for deployment.
But now the Army wants to redeploy him to Iraq, and court- martial him over there.
The charges stem from his pattern of not showing up on time, or sometimes at all.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/311672_soldier14.html

He is not the only one this happened too. There have been over 22,000 given a dishonorable discharge instead of being appreciated and treated for their wounds received while serving the directives of this administration. They have done every duty the other wounded and fallen accomplished and yet their wounds are to be ignored, treated as a burden to society and cast aside as if suddenly they are no use to the military they loved and the nation they served.

The shame is shared by everyone in this nation who believes sticking a removable magnet to the back of their vehicle is all that is needed to support those we send. It is remarkable that this is also the attitude they show to the wounded where their "support" is as removable as the magnet that leaves no trace when taken away. The traces they cannot see or feel because that is reserved for those who truly cared about them and for them.

Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington

Wounded and Waiting video, Why do wounded veterans have to wait

Here are some facts. Not spin. Not what the reporters feel like repeating when they use figures that the DOD claims from time to time, but the cold, hard facts. From burns, to amputations, to suicides and PTSD. Why do they have to fight the wars we send them to fight and then fight us to have those wounds taken care of? It's my latest video. I just got tired of screaming that while the media seems so focused on the reported 99 suicides last year, they failed to mention what the VA said was really happening when they come home. We talk a good game of "supporting" them but when we allow any of this to happen to them, we prove we only talk about support.

Go to the bottom of this blog for Wounded And Waiting and ask yourself if you would wait or if you would be fine with being one of the 600,000 backlogged claims, or one of the discharged under "personality disorder" because you had PTSD and a combat wound? Would you be fine with the media putting out figures that are false and do not include a family member who committed suicide because they couldn't get the care they were promised? Would you be ok with any of this? Then why do we expect them to be?

Kathie Costos

Namguardianangel@aol.com

www.Namguardianangel.org

www.Namguardianangel.blogspot.com

www.Woundedtimes.blogspot.com

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington