Ptsd

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.

Citing the large numbers of military personnel returning from Iraq with psychiatric disorders, lawmakers introduced legislation yesterday in the House of Representatives that would expand veterans' health services and study why veterans' mental-disability payments vary widely across the country. The bill follows a March report in The Inquirer and other newspapers owned by Knight Ridder that the regional offices of the Department of Veterans Affairs produced inconsistent results when it came to determining a veteran's degree of disability and amount of compensation.

AHUNDRED years ago in Europe, combat soldiers who developed tremors and nightmares were executed as traitors or branded as weaklings. We now know that it's normal for combat to cause traumatic reactions. But new research on the mental-health risk of combat in Iraq compels examination of both the short- and long-term psychological impact of this war on our soldiers and their families. A recent study found that one in six members of combat infantry units deployed to Iraq in 2003 exhibited evidence of major depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

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.

LIKE EVERYONE else, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing last Sept. 11. Even as I write these words, waves of nausea and panic fill me. I am scheduled to be in Washington next Wednesday. Recently, I've had nightmares about "something" happening while I'm 300 miles away from my family. In these "sweat dreams," I'm in a war zone, unable to find a car, train or plane to get me home. If I were still a smoker, I would be chain smoking as I write this. If I were still a drinker, I would have a beer beside me. I feel a craving for something sweet or a slice of pizza to numb the anxiety.

Dramatic new ways to look inside the human brain and capture its workings are starting to yield results in the understanding and treatment of mental illness. In an illustration of how the kind of "photography" known as brain imaging has come of age, scientists yesterday announced new findings that could affect the understanding and treatment of schizophrenia, drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. "For the first time in the history of our field, we can study the living brain," Robert Cancro, a psychiatrist at New York University, said at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.

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.

Imagine being too afraid to open your front door and step outside. You choose, instead, to stay safely inside your own four walls for months, even years. This mental disorder, called agoraphobia, gets a credible portrayal amidst the Hollywood terror and gore of the current No. 3 box office draw, "Copycat. " Actress Sigourney Weaver plays criminal psychologist Helen Hudson, who has been too terrified to leave her apartment after being nearly slashed to death 13 months earlier by a serial killer.

WHAT ABOUT GUMP? A high IQ can do a lot for you, including reducing your risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Harvard University researchers. After adjustment for socioeconomic status and other factors, the lower a subject's intelligence, the more severe was his PTSD symptoms, a study of 105 Vietnam combat veterans found. "Cognitive variables may affect the ability to cope with trauma, thereby affecting whether a person develops chronic PTSD," Dr. Richard McNally reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

The Vietnam War still haunts Commer Glass, a former combat soldier from West Philadelphia, and this never-ending nightmare finally has helped him overturn his first-degree murder conviction and life sentence. In a 39-page opinion filed yesterday, U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr. ordered state authorities to give Glass a new trial within 120 days or release him from Graterford Prison, where he's spent the past 19 years. The judge said Glass' defense attorney had failed to investigate the possibility that combat service in Vietnam caused Glass to suffer from post- traumatic stress disorder when Glass was tried in 1976 for murdering a woman friend a year earlier.