Helping veterans heal, grow after war

August 25th, 2007 9:31 pm
Helping veterans heal, grow after war


By Guy Kovner / Press Democrat

Nadia McCaffrey knows the sorrow of war firsthand.

Her son, Army Sgt. Patrick McCaffrey of Tracy, was killed in Iraq in June 2004, and a year later the Pentagon admitted he and another California National Guardsman, 1st Lt. Andre Tyson of Riverside, had been killed by Iraqi civil defense officers attached to their patrol.

They served in Iraq with Petaluma-based A Company of the Guard's 579th Engineer Battalion, which suffered a third casualty -- Sgt. 1st Class Michael Ottolini, a Sebastopol hay truck driver, killed by a roadside bomb.

About 20 North Bay members of the 579th Engineers are about to leave for a year-long tour in Iraq, following a farewell ceremony Thursday at New Jersey's Fort Dix.

McCaffrey, a French-born hospice caregiver-turned-antiwar-activist, wants to make sure they have help and good care when they get back.

On Sunday, McCaffrey, will unveil her latest initiative at a public meeting in Petaluma. It's a campaign to place psychologically scarred veterans in jobs and the healing environments of small farms.

The Farmer-Veteran Coalition, backed by about 20 agricultural and veterans organizations, will be described at a meeting from noon to 3 p.m. at Elim Lutheran Church, 504 Baker St., Petaluma.

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Researchers Examine Most Resilient Soldiers

Facing Combat Without Stress?
Researchers Examine Most Resilient Soldiers

By LISA CHEDEKEL | Courant Staff Writer
August 25, 2007

No one's trying to engineer the perfect soldier.

Yet.

But if a network of researchers that includes clinicians at the veterans hospital in West Haven continues down the track they've set out on, troops heading off to war could someday be inoculated against combat stress.

"Are there ways to emotionally inoculate people? It's a new area of research," said Dr. Steven Southwick, deputy director of the Clinical Neurosciences Division of the National Center for PTSD, an arm of the Department of Veterans Affairs that is housed at the West Haven campus. "We do know there are factors that make some people resilient. There are genetic components to it, but there's a huge learning component. People can train themselves to be more resilient."

Nearly a decade ago, Southwick and his colleagues began studying the chemical and psychosocial factors that make some trauma survivors more resilient than others. Through extensive studies of Vietnam POWs and other trauma survivors, and U.S. special forces and Navy SEALs, the researchers have identified a dozen behavioral traits - and two stress-related hormones - that appear to buffer the effects of psychological trauma.

The findings could have implications for future training, screening and even medication of troops preparing for combat.

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This would be good but in the process, what else will they give up? If they no long feel stress, what else will they not feel? If they no long have fear, then what else will this lead to?

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

Walter Reed Army Institute of Research dumped personal info into trash

Army Lab Documents Found in Trash Bin
By Associated Press
9:40 AM EDT, August 21, 2007

SILVER SPRING, Md. - Boxes of documents containing personal information from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research were supposed to be shredded but instead turned up last week in a trash bin, police said.

A resident of a suburban Washington neighborhood near the Army medical research's campus found the boxes Friday and alerted Montgomery County police.

The files were research study records, said Cynthia Vaughn, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Medical Command. An investigation is under way to determine precisely what information they held and why they appeared off base, Vaughn said Monday. Police said most were from the late 1990s and were likely placed in the bin on the same day they were discovered.

Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention bill blocked by Coburn

The actual title of this post should be "Coburn would rather see vets commit suicide because they buy guns to do it." What the hell is wrong with this man? Does the NRA have such a tie to him that he would rather let combat wounded die because it may give other veterans a problem buying guns? Does he know how many of them commit suicide every year and most of them use a gun to do it?

I have no problem with people owning guns if they do it legally but I do have a problem with putting a loaded gun into the hands of a PTSD veteran who is on the verge of wanting to die and putting the gun into their hands. I do have a problem with unstable veterans with PTSD having guns because if they have a flashback that goes really bad, they can and do use those guns on their family members. I wonder if Coburn ever read the post I did on non-combat deaths so that he could see how many of them killed their family member before they committed suicide? I doubt he would ever read anything that didn't have a big fat donation attached to it.

Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
www.Namguardianangel.org
www.Namguardianangel.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

August 24, 2007
Suicide Bill Blocked
Filed under: PTSD, Legislation, Iraq, Mental Health, Suicide, Readjustment — Patrick Campbell @ 7:44 pm
Right before Congress broke for recess, both parties in the Senate agreed to pass the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention bill (S.479) with unanimous consent. The bill has passed unanimously in House in March. Unfortunately, one unnamed Senator (Coburn - OK) put a hold on it, essentially blocking passage, because this Senator worried that somehow increasing the number of veterans getting treated for PTSD and suicidal thoughts might prevent them later buying guns.

In a recent article in Congressional Quarterly (CQ) I called Coburn’s argument “ludicrous… a red herring.” I further elaborated that Coburn’s concerns more focused on gun control legislation then this suicide prevention bill.
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“I saw his life fall off the face of the earth,”

For a friend, a special way to ask for help

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, August 22, 2007


The guy has been a friend of John Powers since their middle school days in Cumberland. When Powers headed for the University of Rhode Island, his friend headed for the Marine Corps.

His friend came back from Afghanistan in 2005.

“I saw his life fall off the face of the earth,” says Powers. “He couldn’t get a job.”

It has been two years, and still Powers worries. His friend will be OK for a couple of months, then get caught in that dark, frightening confusion that the Marines never prepared him for. He’ll stop calling.

So Powers did something. He is 23 and he did something extraordinary. He looked at his friend and saw hundreds and thousands of others lined up behind him with the same terrible uncertainty about what’s going wrong and what should be done about it.

“I started reading and writing,” he says.

Home From War by Patience Mason

Home from War
By patience mason(patience mason)
Shrinks and family members tend to see the symptoms of PTSD as the problem. Not me. I see war as the problem and the symptoms of PTSD as solutions to the problem of war, something right with you, not something wrong with you. ...
Patience Mason's PTSD Blog - http://patiencemason.blogspot.com/

I remember when very few of us were working on ending the stigma of PTSD because of Vietnam Vets, Patience was one of the few voices being heard. This was when most of us were still dealing with what was happening to our husbands and in turn, our families as well. While I was writing local newspapers, Patience was already on the net doing everything she could to catch the veteran's falling through the cracks. Back then I was still trying to figure out how to use a mouse. She already had a web page and a very large readership.

The early writers were Patience Mason, Mary Beth Williams, Aphrodite Matsakis and Jonathan Shay. In all the years I was researching PTSD, their's were among the best written on the subject. They were easy to understand and got into the personal side of PTSD along with how the families were also paying the price. I suggest reading all their works. Most of what I've learned came from them and heavy research into clinical books but left me feeling as if I were chewing on an emery board trying to get through those. If you really want to understand PTSD there is a wealth of knowledge out there from people who have been dealing with it since the term was coined following the Vietnam war.

Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
www.Namguardianangel.org
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

Outward Bound program helps veterans heal their emotional scars

Outward Bound program helps veterans heal their emotional scars
By Conrad Mulcahy Published: August 24, 2007

THE nine men who climbed to the summit of the Colorado mountain were combat veterans who had fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Several knew the pain of bullets tearing through flesh. Others couldn't gather memories blown away by an explosion. Some had seen combat so close they killed with their knives.

They were a wary group of strangers, guarded and slow to trust, who had arrived at the Outward Bound Wilderness school in Leadville, Colorado, a few days before, wondering how a one-week course in the wilderness could help them heal. But on the fourth day of their five-day journey in mid-July, after more than three hours of tough climbing up steep, moss-covered scree fields and beyond the tree line, these hard military men, ranging in age from 23 to 52, mourned in silence, 13,000 feet above sea level on the summit of Virginia Peak. Stripped of life's routines, they stood under an iron-gray early morning sky and finally allowed the tears to fall for friends who would never see this place.

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America Supports You: Group Lets Troops Know It's 'Hear 4 You'

23. August 2007
America Supports You: Group Lets Troops Know It's 'Hear 4 You'
By Samantha L. Quigley American Forces Press Service
America Supports You: Group Lets Troops Know It's 'Hear 4 You'
WASHINGTON, Aug. 23, 2007 - A group that supports wounded servicemembers and their families is offering troops a friendly ear with its newest program, "Hear 4 You." The no-cost program that launched Aug. 1 aims to develop a network of volunteers to listen to military personnel and their families affected by post-deployment stress and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The program is one of many services offered by Silver Star Families of America, which supports families of wounded servicemembers. The group is a supporter of America Supports You, a Defense Department program connecting citizens and corporations with military personnel and their families serving at home and abroad.

"We are just there to listen," Janie Orman, Silver Star Families of America's vice president, said. "We are not counseling. We want everyone to know that. We don't take the place of a (mental health) professional in any way."

Thirteen Silver Star Families of America volunteers man e-mail or instant-messaging accounts to answer concerns of servicemembers. Military personnel or family members wishing talk to a volunteer through the Hear 4 You program can follow the link from the Silver Star Families of America Web site, http://www.silverstarfamilies.org/. The program's Web site shows which volunteers are online at any given moment.

All volunteers have received training in how to spot signs of post-traumatic stress disorder or suicidal thoughts, Orman said.

"In that particular area, if we feel or get a sense of that in any way, we advise them ... to seek help," she said. "If needed, we'll try to help them find that right then."
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Vets For Freedom, not interested in wounded vets

I would like to know who the hell funds this group?

http://www.votevets.org/

Go there and hear one of them try to deny how serious PTSD is and suicides are in the military.

Go to my other blog for the update on them. This is not a political blog but one of support for veterans with PTSD. When I hear anyone trying to give false information on PTSD, it will be posted here no matter who is doing it. I don't care what side they are on when it comes to Iraq. If they speak the truth on PTSD, they have my support but if they do not, they have my wrath. PTSD does not care what letter comes after their name. Neither do I. Vets come first here, now and always to me. I am the most political when it comes to how our veterans are treated and who is treating them poorly. For those, I'll reserve it for the other blog.