Monday, March 26, 2012

War on terror or war on mental health?

I was deeply disturbed by news of the American soldier who killed 17 Afghan civilians, with commanders and psychiatrists questioning limits on the number of combat tours for individual soldiers.

In The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies 2010 study “Returning Home From Iraq and Afghanistan: Preliminary Assessment of Readjustment Needs of Veterans, Service Members, and Their Families,” researchers describe PTSD and traumatic brain injury as “associated with a host of long-term adverse health outcomes, such as unprovoked seizures, decline in neurocognitive function, dementia, and adverse social-function outcomes, including unemployment and diminished social relationships, depression, and aggressive behaviors.”

The study emphasizes a “tremendous unmet need” for new treatments. More than 1.5 million U.S. military personnel have served in conflict zones in the past nine years; that’s a lot of potential trauma in need of sensitive attention.

If a few years serving under those conditions can have such impact on a soldier’s brain and mental state, it’s hard to imagine what effect such conditions must have on the citizens in those nations who live with it every day of their lives.

Could the steady losses, fear, uncertainty and trauma-induced damage to those citizens provoke some of them into irrational, sometimes deadly terrorist acts? Might their leaders be taking advantage of their diminished capacity by inciting them to violence?

Are we really fighting a war on terror or a war on mental health – theirs and ours?

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in the Daily Sentinel published Sunday, March 25, 2012.