Clarksville child abuse, torture case

Child abuse du jour here.

Resources for Trauma Survivors

ISST-D.

Sidran Foundation.

PTSD Alliance.

Downloadable info from PTSD Alliance.

Sidran Help Desk for finding local resources.

Department of Why How We Look at Things Matters

Once a year, in the weeks before Thanksgiving, I go to the local knife-sharpener to get my knives sharpened. The knife-sharpener is a vet with PTSD, and he knows I'm a therapist. He remembers my first name, every year. He remembers that I see children. Sometimes he remembers that I see both children and adults. He often doesn't remember that my clinical specialty is treating complex PTSD. He didn't remember that today.

In the course of today's conversation, I mentioned that one of the worst misconceptions that people in the military had/have about how to treat PTSD was and is the belief that no one can treat combat PTSD unless they have been in combat. Which is dead wrong. Brain surgeons treat brain problems without having to have those problems themselves. Clinicians don't need to have PTSD (or to have had) successfully to treat people who have PTSD.

My point here is not about PTSD, it's about the weight of thoughts.

How stubborn clinging to beliefs in itself is enough to alter our behavior. In this case, this thought, this single thought stuck inside this person's head, is enough to keep him -- and so many others like him -- from receiving the assistance toward healing they say they wish for.

Remarkable instance of cause and effect.

So, in honor of the knife-sharpener's lost-lasting pre-conceptions, and acknowledging the causal power of immaterial thought to successfully produce effects in the material world, I toast to increased awareness and flexibility of mind.

Vicarious Trauma, Media Frames, Numbing and Avoidance

Article on vicarious traumatization. With commentary.

As an army psychiatrist treating soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, Major Nidal Malik Hasan had a front row seat on the brutal toll of war. It is too early to know exactly what may have triggered his murderous shooting rampage Thursday at Fort Hood - Hasan is accused of killing 12 people and wounding 32 others before he was wounded by a police officer - but it is not uncommon for therapists treating soldiers with Post Trumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.) to be swept up in a patient's displays of war-related paranoia, helplessness and fury. .

In medical parlance it is known as "secondary trauma", [vicarious trauma] and it can afflict the families of soldiers suffering from P.T.S.D. along with the health workers who are trying to cure them. Dr. Antonette Zeiss, Deputy Chief of Mental Health Services for Veteran Affairs, while not wishing to talk about the specific case of the Fort Hood slayings, explained to TIME that: "Anyone who works with P.T.S.D. clients and hears their stories will be profoundly affected."

It's entirely possible that other factors may have acted as a trigger for Hasan . . [who] . .had developed strong objections to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he was also due to be shipped out to Afghanistan, drawing him closer to the terrible scenes described in detail by his patients. At army hospitals dealing with P.T.S.D. patients, the staff is required to periodically fill out a 'resiliency' questionnaire that is supposed to gauge how well they are coping with the burden of their patients' emotional and psychological demands. [filling out a questionnaire? Wow, what a profound therapeutic intervention!] "It takes its toll on people," says one officer at a Colorado military hospital. "You cannot be un-affected by the terrible things these soldiers have undergone."

Most army psychiatrists now have a full caseload of men and women returning from combat zones with P.T.S.D.. A survey by the Rand Corp. last April revealed that one in five service men and women are coming back with post-traumatic stress and mental depression. Previously known as "combat fatigue" or being "shell-shocked", P.T.S.D was only diagnosed as an illness in the 1980s, but it has been around for as long as men have been killing one another and undergoing fearful experiences. It can lead to outbursts of rage, emotional numbness, severe depression, nightmares, and the abuse of alcohol and pain-killers. In extreme cases, P.T.S.D. sufferers have committed suicide and murder. Since the late 1980s, doctors have also learned that over time, along with drugs and therapy, P.T.S.D. is curable.

As part of their therapy, PTSD sufferers are typically asked to dredge up their worst wartime memories. [this is crap. it is also not standard of care. Note the "dredge up' frame, too.]Hearing these nightmarish experiences can stir up powerful reactions in even the most seasoned therapists [note how writer demonizes empathy]. One Colorado sergeant, diagnosed with P.T.S.D., who had served as a dog-handler in Iraq, told me how his psychiatric counselor had broke down sobbing after the soldier described how he had been sent out to find the remains of his close friend, a helicopter pilot, shot down in southern Iraq. "I looked up, and there she was crying," the sergeant says. "I didn't want that from a shrink." [well, that's crap, sergeant.]

But there is a major difference, says Veteran Affairs' Zeiss, between a therapist being moved by combat horror stories and being traumatized by them - though it can happen. "Psychiatrists are trained to notice their own reactions and emotions, and if there's something hard to deal with, they should turn to their peers," she says. [This is incorrect. One should not turn to one's peers. One should go get oneself a competent therapist] But according to some news reports, Hasan's unprofessional conduct was red-flagged early on; at Walter Reed he was given a poor performance report, but that did not hinder his transfer to Fort Hood.

And for even the most hardened army psychiatrist, that would be a grueling assignment. [note how sentence equates "hardness" with competence. Besides being a sexist frame, "hardening" is more like "numbing," a symptom of PTSD] Fort Hood has the highest suicide rate of any army base in the country, largely because so many service men and women stationed there have undergone severe trauma while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. At Fort Hood, in other words, there was no shortage of horrific tales that could have set loose the demons in Hasan's mind.

First We Maim Your Minds, Then We Dump You, Part Three: Haditha Massacre Version

Video photo: Bodies of Haditha massacre victims are loaded onto trucks (Hammurabi Human Rights Group)

MARINES WITNESS MASSACRE AFTERMATH
Receive sub-standard care for PTSD

Via Raw Story/AP:

HANFORD, Calif. (AP) - Two Marines were severely traumatized when told to photograph the corpses of men, women and children after members of their unit allegedly killed as many as two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians, their families said Monday.

Lance Cpl. Andrew Wright, 20, and Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, 21, both members of the Marine unit based at Camp Pendleton, photographed the scene in the western Iraqi city of Haditha with personal cameras they happened to be carrying the day of the attack.

Briones later had his camera confiscated by Navy investigators, his mother said, while Wright's parents said their son was cooperating with the Navy investigation, but declined to comment further.

"It was horrific. It was a terrible scene," Briones' mother, Susie, said in a tearful interview Monday with The Associated Press at her home in California's San Joaquin Valley.

She called the incident a "massacre" and said the military had done little to help her son, who goes by his middle name, deal with his post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I know Ryan is going through some major trauma right now," said Susie Briones, 40, an academic adviser at a community college. "It was very traumatic for all of the soldiers involved with this thing. . . ." Lance Cpl. Briones told his mother he saw the bodies of 23 dead Iraqis.

Susie Briones got a panicked call that day from her son, who said he did not see the shootings but was told by his supervisors to go into the houses and remove the bodies. He brought along a digital camera that his mother had given him before he left for Iraq. One of the bodies was a little girl who had been shot in the head, Susie Briones said. "He had to carry that little girl's body," she said, "and her head was blown off and her brain splattered on his boots."

Briones' best friend, Lance Cpl. Miguel "T.J." Terrazas, had been killed earlier that day by the roadside bomb. He was still grieving when he was sent in to clean up the bodies of the Iraqi civilians, his mother said.

Ryan Briones told the Los Angeles Times that he'd been interrogated twice by Navy investigators while in Iraq. He turned over his digital camera but did not know what happened to it after that.

"They wanted to know if the bodies had been moved or tampered with," said Briones, who has not been interviewed by Navy investigators since he returned from Iraq in April.

Susie Briones said her son has been seeing a private psychiatrist and been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder since his return. She criticized his military care, saying all his military doctors did was give him sleeping pills and antidepressants.

Wright also photographed the scene, according to his parents, Frederick and Patty Wright. They said their son was an innocent victim who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. . . Wright told his parents about the incident soon after it happened. He was distressed, and they reassured him the incident would be investigated and that it wasn't his fault.

The Wrights said Naval Criminal Investigative Service had "all his information," but did not give further details. They declined to say whether he witnessed the killings or what he thought of the allegations against other members of his unit.

He was under so much pressure because of the investigation that he had consulted with an attorney, they said. . .On Monday, both Marines were back at Camp Pendleton, near Oceanside, where base officials said several members of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division were being confined during the investigations. . .Nicholas Grey, a second lieutenant in the Marine Reserves based at Camp Pendleton, said the case will result in a loss of credibility for the Marines and increase Iraqi anger.

"It will make it a lot harder for the Marines," he said.

Yes, it will.

So, shrieky Bushists who disbelieve in alleviating human suffering, doesn't this story just warm the cockles of your heart? Isn't it rich? Isn't it interesting how quickly this version of the AP story disappeared from the internet? Are we getting ready to slag the so-called "trauma industry" again? Nothing to see here. Move along.


Original Time article here.

Haditha
Haditha massacre
Vets
PTSD