Army Captain's Mom wins Above and Beyond Award for work in PTSD

Alumna ‘Above and Beyond Award’ finalist 10/31/07
In 2004, Molly VanDuser, AU class of 1999 of Fuquay Varina, NC,had a comfortable life and a thriving practice as a professional counselor in western New York State where she had lived for 45+ years. But she was moved deeply when her son, an Army captain, called from Afghanistan to say, “We need more counselors like you at Fort Bragg -- my guys have seen too much.”

Within two months, Molly rented out her home and moved to be near the base, armed with only three weeks’ of clothes, a computer, and her books on treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).Molly worked briefly at Fort Bragg with the Victim’s Advocate Program and began volunteering as a guest speaker on mental health to help veterans and military families deal with PTSD. She then joined Webster University as an adjunct faculty member at the Pope Air Force Base satellite unit, where, today, she teaches graduate-level counseling students who are also military personnel.That began her efforts to train and mentor as many local therapists as she could to treat for trauma/PTSD. Molly presents regularly at regional workshops and at state and national conferences as an expert on combat stress. She has worked with the American Counseling Association as a member of their Governing Council and has chaired the Task Force to study and disseminate information on military family resiliency.In 2007 she formed a corporation, Peace of Mind, Inc., the first trauma treatment specialty clinic in her area to offer best practices in mental health.
http://www.alfred.edu/pressreleases/viewrelease.cfm?ID=4335

Molly VanDuser is a licensed professional counselor who earned a master’s degree in counselor education from Alfred University in 1999 after working for more than 15 years in the area of career counseling, human services and education. Practice areas have included college counseling centers; mental health agency and community settings; school-based counseling; employee assistance programs; private practice; and military installations.

Areas of expertise include Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociation; Military Family Adjustment Issues; Childhood Sexual Abuse; Domestic Violence; Crisis and Disaster Counseling; and Stepfamily Dynamics. Molly has completed a 3-year term on the American Counseling Association’s Governing Council; has been published in professional journals; and has presented workshops nationally.

Currently, Ms. VanDuser is an adjunct professor at Webster University’s Pope Air Force Base’s graduate counseling program, teaching Research and Evaluation, and Professional Orientation and Ethics. She is also in private practice near Fort Bragg/Pope AFB.



PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS:


American Counseling Association (ACA)
American Mental Health Counselors Association (AMHCA)
American Red Cross
Chi Sigma Iota International Honor Society for Counselors
EMDRIA
International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors (IAMFC)
Licensed Professional Counselors Association of North Carolina (LPCANC)
Lillington Chamber of Commerce
Mental Health Association of Cumberland County
National Board of Certified Counselors (NBCC)
North Carolina Board of Licensed Professional Counselors (NCBLPC)
North Carolina Counseling Association (NCCA)
Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society
http://www.peace-of-mind-inc.com/index_files/Page530.htm

GFI Sponsors 'Stand Up For Heroes'

GFI Sponsors 'Stand Up For Heroes'

October 31, 2007: 11:30 AM EST

NEW YORK, October 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- GFI Group Inc. has taken 'Medal of Honor' sponsorship at next week's 'Stand Up For Heroes' - a benefit for the Bob Woodruff Family Fund.

The Bob Woodruff Family Fund helps injured members of the United States Armed Forces. Emphasis is placed on traumatic brain injury and combat stress injuries, including post-traumatic stress disorder, sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan.

NBC's Conan O'Brien will host the 'Stand Up For Heroes' benefit, which will feature performances by Lewis Black, Bruce Springsteen and Robin Williams.

"The Bob Woodruff Fund does a marvelous job of helping injured American service men and women and GFI Group is proud to be supporting the Stand Up For Heroes benefit", said Colin Heffron, president of GFI.

The benefit is part of the New York Comedy Festival, which runs from November 6th to 11th.

Go to www.bobwoodrufffamilyfund.org for more on the Bob Woodruff Family Fund and nycomedyfestival.com for more on the New York Comedy Festival.

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Soldier's suicide sparks inquiry in Australia

Captain Andrew Paljakka, an explosives expert with the army, took his own life after a tour of duty in Afghanistan. His death has prompted a military inquiry.
Photo: PA

About 1200 claims from the 16,000 veterans of the East Timor peacekeeping operation have been filed with Veterans Affairs for shell-shock and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Soldier's suicide sparks inquiry in Australia

Les Kennedy
November 1, 2007

HE SERVED in Afghanistan for just six weeks, but it was enough time to see things that would haunt Andrew Paljakka long after his tour of duty ended.

He told of having witnessed a child being raped, and of having to listen to the "gurgling sound" of a man he had shot slowly dying.

After Captain Paljakka, 27, returned to Australia last year, he began drinking heavily and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and severe depression. In February he was admitted to a private hospital in Richmond, NSW, but discharged himself. On February 26, he took his own life. He left a young widow.

His death may prove to be a watershed. Amid growing concern over the psychological impact of modern military service in war zones ranging from Afghanistan to East Timor, a military board of inquiry will sit privately in Sydney to examine whether his suicide may have occurred in the course of his service.

The NSW Coroner will await the outcome of the inquiry before deciding whether to hold an inquest, a spokesman said yesterday.

Captain Paljakka was the youngest army recruit to graduate as an officer from Duntroon Military College in Canberra, and went on to become an expert on major explosives............

..........His suicide follows that of another Afghanistan returnee, former SAS trooper Geffrey Gregg, who took his own life in Perth.

..........In August 2005, two years after being discharged from the Royal Australian Navy after rising to the rank of lieutenant commander, David Buck, 53, a Timor veteran, tried to get NSW police to shoot him dead by staging a robbery at the Umina Bowling Club with a fake bomb.
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Soldiers in Iraq seek help in mental health

Soldiers in Iraq seek help in mental health
Attitudes toward treatment change
October 31, 2007

BY JAY PRICE

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

CAMP VICTORY, Iraq -- U.S. troops in Iraq, facing the stress of multiple, extended combat tours, are increasingly willing to seek mental health counseling while in the field, military medical experts say.

Combat-stress experts from the 785th Medical Company, an Army Reserve unit from Ft. Snelling, Minn., that originally deployed to Iraq in 2004 and redeployed in August after two years in the United States, say they've noticed a substantial change in attitudes toward mental health treatment, which has long been stigmatized.


"There hasn't been that challenge of having to go out and kind of sell ourselves to make sure people know that we're here and this is an important part of the combat experience for everybody," said Capt. Troy Fiesel, the company's operations officer.

"Now we've got people walking in and saying, 'Hey, I know I have got this issue,' or 'I had this problem last time and I need to keep working on it.' "

The willingness to seek help comes as the Pentagon pushes mental health care as some troops enter their third or fourth deployments in a war with no front lines and no safe rear areas and as the first tours of duty that were extended to 15 months grind to an end.
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Who is counting PTSD suicides besides families?

A total of 147 troops have killed themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of the wars, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center, which tracks casualties for the Pentagon.

Add the number of returning veterans and the finding is that at least 430 of the 1.5 million troops who have fought in the two wars have killed themselves over the past six years. And that doesn't include people like Gallagher's husband who committed suicide after their combat tours and while still in the military — a number the Pentagon says it doesn't track.

That compares with at least 4,227 U.S. military deaths overall since the wars started — 3,840 in Iraq and 387 in and around Afghanistan.

Iraq, Afghan Vets at Risk for Suicides
By KIMBERLY HEFLING – 9 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mary Gallagher did not get a knock at the door from a military chaplain with news of her Marine husband's death in a faraway place. Instead, the Iraq war veteran committed suicide eight months after returning home.

She is left wondering why.

It's a question shared by hundreds of families of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have taken their own lives in a homecoming suicide pattern of a magnitude that is just starting to emerge.

Preliminary Veterans Affairs Department research obtained by The Associated Press reveals for the first time that there were at least 283 suicides among veterans who left the military between the start of the war in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001 and the end of 2005.

The numbers, while not dramatically different from society as a whole, provide the first quantitative look at the toll on today's combat veterans and are reminiscent of the increased suicide risk among returning soldiers in the Vietnam era.

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Pot use to treat PTSD

PTSD and Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy -VS- Marijuana
by Dr. Phil Leveque

(MOLALLA, Ore.) - According to almost anyone suffering from PTSD, their pharmaceutical therapists, psychotherapists, psychologists and any of thousands of workers in this field admit if truthful that almost nothing tried thus far has worked.

The first written reference to PTSD was in 1900 B.C. by an Egyptian Army physician who called it "hysterical reaction to trauma."

This was reported nearly 4,000 years later by Veith in 1965. It is probable that it occurred in every war since, and it is also probable that the self-medicating treatment was alcohol, which is still used widely today.

The U.S. Civil War produced "soldiers disease" which was most likely PTSD plus opium addiction, and opiates are still used for PTSD today. The Spanish-American War gave us Cuba Libras (rum & lime juice) and World War I gave us Cognac, lots of French wine and probably lots of opiates.
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One way to find out if it is good at treating PTSD is to go here for a study

Cannabis (drug)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cannabis, also known as marijuana[1] or ganja,[2] is a psychoactive product of the plant Cannabis sativa L. subsp. indica (= C. indica Lam.) and Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa. The herbal form of the drug consists of dried mature flowers and subtending leaves of pistillate ("female") plants. The resinous form, known as hashish,[3] consists primarily of glandular trichomes collected from the same plant material.


A dried flowered bud of the Cannabis sativa plant.The major biologically active chemical compound in cannabis is Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), commonly referred to as THC.

Humans have been consuming cannabis since prehistory,[4] although in the 20th century there was a rise in its use for recreational, religious or spiritual, and medicinal purposes. It is estimated that about four percent of the world's adult population use cannabis annually and 0.6 percent daily.[5] The possession, use, or sale of psychoactive cannabis products became illegal in most parts of the world in the early 20th century. Since then, some countries have intensified the enforcement of cannabis prohibition while others have reduced the priority of enforcement, almost to the point of legalization, as is the case in the Netherlands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_(drug)

But it looks like the Netherlands has already studied it and use it. It also looks like throughout history, a lot of other nations have used it, including our own.

Veterans' suicide study, not as spun before

Veterans' suicide study yields key findings
Medical Studies/Trials
Published: Tuesday, 30-Oct-2007


The largest and most up-to-date study of suicides among depressed veterans provides important new data that may help guide screening and treatment for all veterans.

Published online (Oct. 30), the study finds that the predictors of suicide among veterans in depression treatment differ from those seen in the general American population, with younger, white, non-Hispanic men having the highest risk among the veterans.

Veterans with substance abuse issues, and those who had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons in the year before their depression diagnosis, also had a higher suicide risk. Surprisingly, older veterans who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in addition to depression had a lower overall rate of suicide than those without a PTSD diagnosis, perhaps because they were more likely to receive care through Veterans Affairs PTSD programs.

Though the study did not directly compare populations of veterans and non-veterans receiving treatment for depression, the study does confirm that suicide rates were very high among depressed VA patients during the study period of 1999 to 2004, reinforcing the need for the VA's recent initiatives to prevent suicide.

The study, conducted by researchers from the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and the University of Michigan Health System and U-M Depression Center, will appear in the December American Journal of Public Health issue focused on veterans' issues.
go here for the rest
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=31927

When I read this, I thought I lost my mind. I went back to the earlier post to see if maybe I got the other report wrong. I have to admit here and now, as I often do, that I'm personally interested in what gets reported. For me to have taken the original out of context would be very possible. Looks like I didn't. I re-read it and then read this report. This one seems to be the way it was originally reported and not what the New York Times printed it. The question is, why would the Times reported it differently?

Afghanistan veterans not getting needed mental health care in Canada either

Afghanistan veterans not getting needed mental health care, audit finds
Mike Blanchfield , CanWest News Service
Published: Tuesday, October 30, 2007
OTTAWA - The Canadian Forces are falling short in meeting the mental health needs of soldiers returning from Afghanistan because the demand for care is "outstripping available resources," Auditor General Sheila Fraser said in a report to Parliament Tuesday.

The shortfalls, which came to light as part of a broader audit of the rising cost of military health care, suggest the military has yet to learn some hard lessons of the past decade, when retired general Romeo Dallaire, now a Liberal senator, offered himself as a poster boy for the mental health suffering of many Canadian peacekeepers who served with him in Rwanda or on other operations in the Balkans.

This latest audit suggests that the Defence Department is failing to meet the needs of the new generation of men and women currently serving in Afghanistan as part of the military's most demanding combat mission since the Korean War more than half a century ago.


One disabled veteran of Canada's involvement in the first Persian Gulf War of 1991 questioned how the Forces can justify purchasing $20 billion worth of new planes, helicopters and other hardware, while neglecting the well documented mental health needs of their personnel.
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Study Looks at Suicide in Veterans?

In the study, Kara Zivin, a psychiatric researcher at the University of Michigan and the veterans’ agency, led a research team that evaluated records for 807,694 veterans treated in the system between April 1999 and September 2004. The group included men and women who had served in Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan, though the researchers did not do separate analysis for each conflict.


The study did not evaluate the methods used in the suicides, which could also account from some differences between veterans and nonveterans. In the study among veterans living in the community published last summer, which was led by Dr. Kaplan, more than 80 percent of the suicides were committed with a gun. The rate in non-nveterans was 55 percent.
The study, a joint effort between the University of Michigan and the veterans’ agency that included detailed records from more than 800,000 veterans, is the largest and most comprehensive in this group of patients and the first to include troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Study Looks at Suicide in Veterans

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: October 30, 2007
Veterans receiving treatment for depression are no more likely to take their own lives than civilian patients, according to a large Veterans Affairs study published this afternoon.

So what did they include? Which veterans were tested and studied? First off no one can take this seriously simply because they did not bother to check records from every newspaper across the country to see how many veterans committed suicide. That would have been a great place to start simply because most of them never saw a single VA doctor, either because they didn't know what PTSD was, or because they didn't trust them at all. Given the fact so many claims are still trapped in the system, you also need to look at how many applied for a disability connected to PTSD and were denied, never to darken the door to a VA hospital or clinic again. They need to look at what the DOD has found from veterans within their own files. Those committing suicide back home on bases across the country as well as those committing suicide "in country" under their command.

In cities and towns across this country, there are many veterans in the obituary pages dying at a fairly young age. Some die because of Agent Orange, other chemical exposures, but when you read the words, "suddenly" alarm bells should sound, but not necessarily connected to PTSD and suicide.

Let's put this in terms people like me can understand without having to read reports like this several times before they can understand it. Unless they can manage to take a study seriously, by separating them by branch of service, combat or none combat duty, then none of their studies will add up to the paper they are printed on.

You could have a Marine, never setting foot in Iraq or Afghanistan, included in a study like this. You could end up not taking into consideration someone from the Air Force, who was in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are too many open ends to this. In WWII there were survivors of kamikaze pilots hitting ships. You wouldn't think off hand someone who had never set foot in battle developing PTSD, but a sailor on one of these ships would develop PTSD.

In Vietnam, it was not just the grunts, but the helicopter pilots who were favorite targets of the VC. Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are not as many being shot down but they are being shot at.

Did this study include veterans who knew or saw someone blown apart? Did they include veterans who were shot at or even near an IED? Did they include people working in the motor pool who had to retrieve body parts along with burnt out vehicles?

When they look at the suicide rates of civilians, they also need to take into consideration if the person was involved in a traumatic event. When they look at events, like 9-11 and Katrina for examples, the rates of suicide are much higher. They need to look at everything when they are trying to study the aftermath of trauma and all traumas for comparison. These are not random suicides over a broken heart, bad grades or no friends. PTSD suicides are born from trauma. The rest of the population seeking suicide are a blended mix of environment, mental illnesses, support systems, education and faith. Suicide comes with the lack of hope. In PTSD wounded most of the suicides come from the lack of knowledge which offers hope.

This is my opinion but I'm going to wait until experts take a look at this study. It's happened before and the studies in the past have been proven wrong. This one just doesn't seem to have all the dots connected.

Marines in Iraq look to pastor for answers to tough questions

"They don't think their dead comrade should be awarded the honor of a marine killed in action. But asked if the unit should refuse any memorial at all, their heads snap up. "He deserves something," the tall one says adamantly. His mate nods in agreement."

PART 1: US Navy Chaplain Michael Baker ( Read the full series )
Military chaplain: Marines in Iraq look to pastor for answers to tough questions
From a buddy's suicide to a religious ritual, young troops count on Lt. Michael Baker.
By Lee Lawrence Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the October 30, 2007 edition

Habbaniyah, Iraq - Under a sun-blanched desert sky, Navy Chaplain Michael Baker and Marine Sgt. Bill Hudson Gross bounce in the back of a truck as it rumbles across Camp Habbaniyah. Clad in helmets and body armor in the 110-degree F. June heat, they're on a mission: to baptize Sergeant Gross.

"I am going to try to talk him out of it," confesses Chaplain Baker, a tall, lanky Methodist minister whose formal Mississippi-tinged speech and posture mask an often goofy sense of humor.

It's not the baptism itself; it's just the part where Gross wants Baker to immerse him in the Euphrates, one of four rivers that the Bible describes as flowing from the Garden of Eden. For Gross, an infantry platoon leader who just weeks before saw two of his men wounded by shrapnel, the river has a personal connection. Two years ago he deployed to a small base on the river, where he turned his back on religion after learning of his father's death back home. Now that he has rediscovered his faith, he feels it fitting to be baptized in a river where, he says, "a lot of people gave up hope."

Baker enumerates the problems with Gross's plan: "There is the issue of water pollution and the issue of security," he says. By stepping into the Euphrates, they would technically be leaving the confines of the camp, home to the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. Safer to wear their 25-pound body armor and risk drowning, he wonders? Or better to stand in the river without it and risk being shot? His laugh at the predicament is loud and staccato.

For military chaplains in war zones, even very routine requests can prove challenging – as Baker has discovered, it is not always easy to satisfy basic emotional and spiritual needs of individual troops within the hard-edged, mission-oriented goals and guidelines of the command.

go here for the rest
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1030/p20s01-usmi.html?page=1

What's it going to take for Marines and the rest of the units with people in combat zones to understand this came from a combat wound? What makes them think it is any less worthy, noble or heroic than being cut down by a bullet from the enemy or a bomb? They all need to understand that although there were other options, this is in fact a war wound that claimed a life. The bullet may have come from the Marine's own finger pulling the trigger, but the wound was caused from combat.


PTSD is an insidious killer.

Main Entry: in·sid·i·ousFunction: adjectivePronunciation: in-'si-de-&sEtymology: Latin insidiosus, from insidiae ambush, from insidere to sit in, sit on, from in- + sedere to sit -- more at SIT 1 a : awaiting a chance to entrap : TREACHEROUS b : harmful but enticing : SEDUCTIVE 2 a : having a gradual and cumulative effect : SUBTLE b of a disease : developing so gradually as to be well established before becoming apparent

It is far more dangerous than a bullet fired at random or a bomb just waiting to claim another life. This one kills slowly with more far reaching victims. It takes buddies. It takes families. It takes friends. With normal combat deaths, the grief is answered with the knowledge of what happened and when. With PTSD and suicides, there are no clear answers. Everyone is left to wonder what they could have done to save the life. Everyone is left to wonder when it got so bad that there was no hope left to want to live. Everyone is left to wonder when it all started.

When they have PTSD, which is a wound from trauma, there is a golden window of opportunity to treat the wound before it infects the casualty. Left alone it eats away more of the character until there is nothing left. This is not something that should ever be treated as less worthy of honoring the life. It should always be more worthy of saving a life than it is. Until we all get it into our brain that this is a wound as surely as a bullet cuts into the skin, we will lose more by their own finger on the trigger, their own hand on a noose, their own hand on a bottle of pills.

These Marines in this article spoke of the code. The code also says never leave anyone behind. If they do not take action helping those wounded by trauma, they are in fact leaving them behind to be taken by the enemy. The enemy they can no longer see, but the one suffering from the ghosts does. kc