Ptsd

Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) visited the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Coatesville yesterday and expressed concern about allegations of patient abuse and inadequate treatment of mental patients. An aide to the senator said that after meeting with officials at the hospital, Specter wrote to the inspector general of the VA asking for information about an investigation that started Jan. 14. The investigation was based on a written statement by nursing aide Robert Roemer, who admitted abusing four elderly patients, one of whom died three months later.

Of the 40-student cast and crew, nearly half have a friend or family member in the military. So if ever there was a time and place to reimagine Shakespeare's Macbeth as a tragedy of modern war, it's now, at West Chester University. Macbeth himself (Philadelphia senior Jim Vadala) just spent spring break reconnecting with buddies back with their own war stories to share. Shannon Kearns, a junior Gentlewoman, rushes to the computer to check on a deployed pal from the Poconos whenever she hears of a skirmish in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON - A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo thinks of himself as a killer - and he carries the guilt every day. "I can't forgive myself," he says. "And the people who can forgive me are dead. " With American troops at war for more than a decade, there has been an unprecedented number of studies into war-zone psychology and an evolving understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. Clinicians suspect some troops are suffering from what they call "moral injuries" - wounds from having done something, or failed to stop something, that violates their moral code.

Risk factors linked to sudden cardiac death University of Pennsylvania researchers have identified risk factors that put postmenopausal women with heart disease at high risk of sudden cardiac death - abruptly dying of a lethal arrythmia. Currently, the only established risk factor for sudden cardiac death is weak heart contractions, measured by an echocardiogram. But many heart disease patients whose heart develops a lethal arrythmia don't have this weakening. For their study, the Penn researchers analyzed data from a previous study of 2,763 postmenopausal heart disease patients.

One psychiatrist-cum-war criminal turned this city into hell. Now Sarajevo's other psychiatrists are exorcising the consequences. For almost four years, as his soldiers were shelling the town where he once lived and worked, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader and accused war criminal, used his keen understanding of the trauma brought by terror to destroy the minds of Sarajevans, old, young and very young. Today, there is no war here - at least not in the military sense. Children can play outside without fear of mortars, soldiers are demobilized, and families are reunited as refugees timidly return.

The unkempt man was wearing fatigues, standing in the street and holding a sign that read, "Vietnam vet. Please help. God bless. " The year was 2005 and Barbara Van Dahlen, a licensed clinical psychologist, was driving with her then-9-year-old daughter, who asked why the man was begging in the world's richest country. It was a moment that helped propel Van Dahlen into her official mission, the founding that year of Give an Hour, a national nonprofit providing free mental health services to military personnel and their families affected by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other post-9/11 conflicts.

U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony J. Principi said Tuesday yesterday that the violent guerrilla tactics used by insurgents in Iraq would take a considerable toll on the mental health of troops, resulting in a lifetime of disability payments for many of those who return from war. So far, 20 percent of returning Iraq veterans who have sought VA care have done so for mental-health issues. While the exact cost of compensating those injured in the Iraq war is uncertain, the VA already expects to pay $600 billion over the next three decades in disability payments to veterans of earlier wars.

Jeffrey Corcoran was manning a security checkpoint in Baquba, Iraq, on that deadly day in 2003 when four insurgents with AK-47s jumped out of a car and began firing. A lieutenant, "a real nice guy who was more of a friend than an officer," was cut down in the cross fire in front of Corcoran and died. At the time, Corcoran, an infantry mortarman from Strasburg, Lancaster County, didn't have the luxury of sorting out his feelings about what had happened. That came after he left the service in February 2004 - and found he couldn't sleep, concentrate or hold a job. He was angry, physically sick, and uneasy without a weapon.

The last of the Soviet troops left Afghanistan in February 1989, going home after more than nine years of war to a reception that mirrored in many ways that faced by returning U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War. Speeches boasting of the "soldier-internationalists" who had done their duty failed to mask the indifference of a nation going about its business, glad to be done with an unpopular war. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was on...

Veterans need our help with stress disorder There are servicemen and women returning from the Iraq war with memories that will haunt them. These Americans need help, more help than we gave to Vietnam veterans, some of whom are suffering recurrences of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of exposure to news of the Iraq war. I lost someone to PTSD. No, he wasn't some crazy lost soul. He was a business school graduate, an international finance expert, and eventually a successful minister.