On the one hand, the fact that the Iraq War will produce more suicides than combat deaths could be seen as a triumph of modern battlefield medicine.
On the other hand, given that mental health is more of a long-term problem than a short-term one, mental health problems should be mostly treatable. So it is an absolute disgrace that we are not providing adequate mental health care to our returning soldiers:
Soldiers who'd been exposed to combat trauma were the most likely to suffer from depression or PTSD, the Rand report said. About 53 percent of soldiers with those conditions sought treatment during the past year. Half of those who got care were judged by Rand researchers to have received inadequate treatment.
Failure to adequately treat the mental and neurological problems of returning soldiers can cause a chain of negative events in the lives of affected veterans, the researchers said. About 300,000 soldiers suffer from depression or PTSD, the report said.
This is why the "I put a yellow magnet on my car" version of "supporting the troops" infuriates me. That's politics as personal symbolic expression and noting more. Returning soldiers don't need magnets. They need medical care. And we aren't giving it to them.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
