Army
officials work to treat invisible wounds of war
By:
By Fred W. Baker III American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON (Dec. 26, 2010)
-- Military leaders and troops alike need more time at home
between deployments to help diagnose and receive treatment
for the "invisible" wounds of war such as post-traumatic
stress, a senior Army officer said today.
"It affects everything. It affects the
divorce rate. It affects substance abuse. It affects everything.
And we've kind of taken our focus and shifted it to ensure
that we're getting at that," Army Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli,
the vice chief of staff of the Army, said on ABC's "This
Week" with Christiane Amanpour.
"You want to get at these issues. We
need more time at home before deployment," Chiarelli
said.
Complicating matters, the symptoms of post-traumatic
stress take sometimes months or years to show. More research
is needed to understand the brain and the effects of stress,
Chiarelli said.
"I think we're doing everything we possibly
can to learn as much as we can about the brain. And that's
really the issue. It's trying to understand the brain as well
as we do the other organs in the body," he said.
"We just don't know that much about the
brain. We automatically assume so many times that a person
that's in a blast has a concussion. Many times, they don't
have a concussion. Instead, they have post-traumatic stress,"
Chiarelli said.
The Army has implemented new programs both
in theater and here at home to identify and treat those who
show signs of suffering from post-traumatic stress, but there
is still much to learn about the brain and how it responds
stress and treatment.
In Afghanistan, Soldiers are now sent to resiliency
centers after suffering a bomb blast.
If a Soldier is in a vehicle that is damaged,
within 15 meters of a blast, in a building with a blast or
if they lose consciousness, they are given an initial medical
evaluation and pulled from the fight for 24 hours.
"Sometimes the symptoms of concussion
don't display themselves for 24 hours. We give them a second
evaluation, and if they pass that, they in fact go back to
duty. If they fail either one of those in that 24-hour period,
they go to a resilience center where we rest them until the
brain has had an opportunity to heal from that concussion,"
Chiarelli said.
Before, the Soldiers would have likely simply
continued on duty.
"We had Soldiers who knew that they'd
had a concussion, knew that they had had their, quote, 'bell
rung,' and they did nothing about it," the general said.
Chiarelli said that treating the stress on
the battlefield is more effective than waiting until the Soldier
returns from deployment for medical help.
"We know in treating PTS the closer you
treat PTS to the event that occurs, the more likely you are
to help that individual," he said. "So much so that,
if the event occurs in the morning, it's very important that
you bring the individual's anxiety level down before they
go to sleep that night, because in [rapid eye movement] sleep,
something happens in the brain that causes an individual to
remember that and make the PTS harder to treat."
Once the Soldier returns from combat, military
leaders at Army installations work to identify those troops
who engage in high-risk behaviors.
"What we see is a Soldier who's down
range for 12 months in a very high adrenaline environment,
where every single day, he or she finds themselves facing
an enemy. And they come home, and many times, want to replicate
that," he said.
"We're looking at programs that, first
of all, ensure that we are identifying early on those who
are going to have a rough time reintegrating. And then taking
Soldiers and putting them in high-stress kind of events that
are safe for them, such as water rafting and out doing those
kind of sports to burn off that adrenaline, rather than getting
on a motorcycle and traveling down the road at 100 miles an
hour without a helmet on," he said.
Chiarelli said he briefs the leadership of
every brigade combat team before deployment on the effects
of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress and needed
treatment.
Also, Chiarelli added, the Army works closely
with Veterans Affairs to ensure Soldiers leaving the service
understand their ongoing treatment options.
"You know, the problem with post-traumatic
stress is that in the United States, the National Institute
of Mental Health will tell you, for regular civilians, it
is 12 years between the initiating event and when someone
first seeks help. Now the issue there isn't that they finally
seek help. It's all the things that happen in between,"
he said. |
