America's Medicated Army
Thursday, Jun. 05, 2008 By MARK THOMPSON
Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad's dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. "We'd been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me," LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own messes.
He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. "You don't always know who the bad guys are," he says. "When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor — things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would."
So LeJeune visited a military doctor in Iraq, who, after a quick session, diagnosed depression. The doctor sent him back to war armed with the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons," LeJeune says. "If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills."
While the headline-grabbing weapons in this war have been high-tech wonders, like unmanned drones that drop Hellfire missiles on the enemy below, troops like LeJeune are going into battle with a different kind of weapon, one so stealthy that few Americans even know of its deployment. For the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines.
Data contained in the Army's fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope. Escalating violence in Afghanistan and the more isolated mission have driven troops to rely more on medication there than in Iraq, military officials say.
But if the Army numbers reflect those of other services — the Army has by far the most troops deployed to the war zones — about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were on such medications last fall. The Army estimates that authorized drug use splits roughly fifty-fifty between troops taking antidepressants — largely the class of drugs that includes Prozac and Zoloft — and those taking prescription sleeping pills like Ambien.
Medication helps but it is not the answer. All psychiatric medications come with them a requirement the patient is monitored. Medication alone cannot and should not be expected to treat PTSD. If you go to the link of the video below, you will hear how talk therapy works best when addressing PTSD and how the brain manages to learn how to reprocess the events.
Ambien itself is a danger
U.S. Food and Drug Administration urged sleep drug manufacturers Wednesday to strengthen their package labeling to include warnings of sleep walking, "sleep driving" and other behaviors.
A class action lawsuit against Sanofi-Aventis, the maker of Ambien, was filed on March 6, 2006, by those claiming that they engaged in a bizarre variety of activities while asleep after taking the drug -- from binge eating to driving their cars while asleep.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=2952054&page=1
When it comes to fighting wars, though, troops have historically been barred from using such drugs in combat. And soldiers — who are younger and healthier on average than the general population — have been prescreened for mental illnesses before enlisting.
Here is just one more example of how any kind of non-sense of a preexisting personality disorder is not possible. Unless the tests given are flawed, there is no way a soldier can have a mental disorder and be enlisted in service and given a weapon.
Medication for a wound of the mind and a weapon is not a good idea. It is not only giving the soldier a means to end their suffering, it puts the rest of the platoon in danger.
The symptoms often continue back home, playing a key role in broken marriages, suicides and psychiatric breakdowns. The mental trauma has become so common that the Pentagon may expand the list of "qualifying wounds" for a Purple Heart — historically limited to those physically injured on the battlefield — to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on May 2 that it's "clearly something" that needs to be considered, and the Pentagon is weighing the change.
The Army says half of the suicides among the troops happen after a breakup. While some want to dismiss this percentage of suicides as "just another breakup" the soldier couldn't deal with, they do not look at the root cause of the breakup. Extended deployments and redeployments play a role in this however we do a disservice to the soldiers when we leave it at that. People do get depressed when they breakup with someone they love in normal life. Divorce is stressful. A serious relationship ending is stressful, however, we do not see anything near this rate in "normal" life. What we do see is that when PTSD is alive in a relationship, the relationship itself becomes stressful. (More on this below) What needs to be addressed is why there are so many divorces and breakups instead of just leaving it at that.
Which means that any drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours. If troops do not get sufficient time away from combat — both while in theater and during the "dwell time" at home before they go back to war — it's possible that antidepressants and sleeping aids will be used to stretch an already taut force even tighter. "This is what happens when you try to fight a long war with an army that wasn't designed for a long war," says Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan Administration.
go here for more
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1811858,00.html
While the Army can come out with all kinds of studies showing the harm being done to the soldiers with the extended deployments and redeployments, the DOD is not considering any of the studies. They just do it because they can. Imagine being at the end of your part of the deal with the DOD that tells your brain your time is over and you get to go back to civilian life in a manner of weeks only to discover that you have been "stop-loss" and extended with or without your agreement. This is not just a let down but an attack on the brain. It is not just a matter of sending them home to "rest" because they cannot when they know they will have to go back into Iraq and Afghanistan and the danger to their lives is not over but in a truce instead.
Many spouses are not able to cope with the stress of the redeployments and extended tours of duty. No matter how much support they receive from friends and families, it is nearly impossible to stay in the marriage when PTSD is added into the stress they have to endure. Give the fact that there are still too many military spouses unaware of what PTSD is, they lack the tools to cope with the emotional changes on the relationship.
In order to retain a trained force and save money, the price is being paid by the soldiers as well as their families. It is an outrageous ambivalence toward all of them when the quality of their lives falls so low in the concern of the command.
The PTSD part of this interview begins about 20 minutes into the program. Dennis Charney MD, Bruce McEwen Ph.D, and Joe LaDeoux Ph.D are interviewed by Charlie Rose.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2325225245580975678&q=+fear+brain&ei=RBlISPfAEYa4igLpgr3NDA
While medications work well, the combination of them, no therapy, no one checking on the patient, a well trained soldier with a weapon, it is a dangerous combination and must end.
