By Jeff Mason Reuters
WASHINGTON, April 9 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama on Thursday said the government would create a national electronic medical records system for the military that will serve as a model for broad reform of U.S. healthcare administration.
The system, organized by the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs, would follow military personnel from active duty through retirement, keeping records organized and complete.
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By ERIC NEWHOUSE Great Falls Tribune
Sen. Max Baucus introduced legislation Wednesday night requiring stepped-up mental health screenings for all American combat troops.
The purpose for the testing — to be done every six months for the first two years after a soldier returns from combat — will be to identify post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury or major depression resulting from combat, Baucus said.
It’s based on the model developed by the Montana National Guard following the suicide of Chris Dana, a former combat vet with the 163rd Infantry who died a few days after being given a less-than-honorable discharge for failing to attend Guard drills.
“When I hear of young men and women whose life is ended too soon or who have had to silently battle mental conditions, it absolutely devastates me,” said Baucus. “And that is why I wanted to introduce this much-needed legislation because if we can prevent just one needless tragedy, it would have been worth it.”
According to a RAND Corp. study last year, one in three combat veterans will return home with PTSD, TBI or major depression so severe that it will require treatment. Last year, the Army reported 143 suicides, the highest number since the Army began keeping records in 1980.
The legislation — which is expected to cost $220 million over five years — would apply to the National Guard and the Reserves, as well as to active-duty soldiers.
“It’s everybody,” Matt Kuntz of Helena, Dana’s stepbrother, exclaimed Wednesday. “We designed it for everyone who goes into combat.
“This is going to help ensure that this generation doesn’t have to go through decades and decades of pain, like the Vietnam vets did,” Kuntz added. “I’m very grateful for this legislation.”
Currently, states have different mental health assessment procedures for returning combat troops. Some soldiers are asked to fill out questionnaires self-identifying their problems, while others receive face-to-face counseling.
Only Montana conducts face-to-face screenings for the full two years after deployment, then adds a mental health component to the physical exam given each soldier each year.
“We have a great program in Montana,” said Sen. Jon Tester. “If we can get similar things done in the National Guard across the country, that would be a huge step, and if we can get the Department of Defense to buy into it, that would be another huge step.
“Ultimately, it’s the right thing to do because it saves money, it saves lives, and it does the right thing to help the young men and women who have volunteered to serve their country,” Tester said in a recent interview.
Some steps are already being taken by the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C., which coordinates activities and advises the National Guard organization in each state.
The bureau has received $7.5 million to build a mental health network nationwide by hiring a director of psychological health in each state, Capt. Joan Hunter said recently.
“That funding is wonderful, but it needs to be multiplied by tens,” said Pete Duffy, deputy director for legislation of the National Guard Association.
The new director’s job has been posted in Montana and the Guard is interviewing candidates, said Col. Jeff Ireland, chief of manpower and personnel for the Guard in Helena.
“When the directors of psychological health are in place, we’ll create a psychological health screening committee that will drive this program forward with best health practices that are documented, not merely anecdotal,” Hunter said.
The bureau has also received $65.4 million to fund the Yellow Ribbon Program, the pilot program Montana pioneered last year, for nationwide implementation by the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard.
“Obviously, it’s becoming a success story, so we’re grateful to be able to implement it around the country,” said Lt. Col. Mike Johnson, the National Guard Legislative Liaison Branch Chief in Washington.
One important component is a family reintegration effort. In other states, soldiers returning from combat are given the first 90 days off, but Guard officials at Fort Harrison realized that combat vets needed their buddies as a support group.
The Guard in Montana has begun bringing soldiers and their families together in civilian clothes at a convention center where they can socialize together, but also attend seminars on such things as marriage enrichment, anger management, personal finance, and learning how to drive as civilians again.
“One of the most important components of the Yellow Ribbon program is to have our service members be able to keep in contact with each other,” said Hunter.
“It’s important to be able to keep an eye on our soldiers,” agreed Randy Knowles, the Guard Bureau’s information officer. “Otherwise, they feel abandoned.”
“And it’s important that our soldiers realize they have a responsibility to maintain their emotional and mental health in the same way they maintain their physical fitness,” Hunter said.
Hunter said she has been watching the TriWest pilot programs in California and Montana that put embedded counselors in National Guard armories during drill weekends to be available for assistance and to observe abnormal behavior among soldiers beginning to show signs of PTSD.
“The Montana National Guard has now taken over that responsibility,” Hunter said. “That’s why what Montana is doing is so impressive — it shows the state’s commitment.”
Ireland said Montana is now spending nearly $80,000 a year on the embedded counselor program.
Hunter cautioned now that it’s critical not to lose momentum and said it has been gratifying to hear President Obama’s repeated statements about the importance of treating soldiers with PTSD.
“It will be most important with this new administration coming on board that we remember the sacrifices these young men and women have made,” said Hunter. “With all the economic challenges and with all the demands on our system, it’s vital that these reforms not slip off the table.”
By By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced yesterday that the Army will phase out the unpopular practice of “stop-loss,” which mandates that soldiers stay in the Army beyond their service obligation, over the next two years.
In the meantime, the Pentagon will offer extra pay to soldiers who continue to serve under the policy, Gates said.
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By Kenneth T. Walsh
First ladies are always the subject of fascination. Their experiences often illustrate the evolving roles of women in our society, and they are usually an essential part of the governing team at the White House. Most first ladies have taken on special projects that reflect their core values, such as highway beautification for Lady Bird Johnson and the promotion of reading for Laura Bush. Michelle Obama is emulating her predecessors, with a difference. Her signature initiative–improving the lives of military families–has become a personal mission and an emotional cause.
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By Eric Newhouse Great Falls Tribune
HELENA — Two years after former Army Spc. Chris Dana committed suicide after struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, the Montana National Guard is spending approximately half a million dollars a year to make combat deployments easier for its soldiers and their families.
The Montana Guard’s Yellow Ribbon program has become a model that the rest of America should adopt, said U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.
“We’re getting terrific responses to the program from the families of our soldiers, but also some great suggestions,” said Col. Jeff Ireland, chief of manpower and personnel for the Montana Guard. “For instance, we were told it would be useful to have a special breakout session for spouses.
Ireland said officials believe the session was a great idea.
“We plan to act on it and other suggestions until we meet all the needs we’re aware of,” he added.
With the approval and funding of the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C., the Montana National Guard is adding five positions and spending approximately $500,000 to fund the Yellow Ribbon program, Ireland said.
The core of the program is twofold: mental health assessments every six months after deployment and crisis response teams that can be activated immediately to check out concerns about the emotional wellbeing of a soldier.
“The genius of the Montana screening model is that it happens every six months,” Matt Kuntz, Dana’s stepbrother, told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee last week during testimony in Washington.
“I really — in my heart — believe that if they would have sat down with Chris six months (after his redeployment to Iraq), when he could no longer go to drill, when he was having the flashbacks, when he was having trouble dealing with his own family — that’s when that counselor could have gotten him out of his shell,” Kuntz said. “But I tell you, we tried later — a year later — and it was too late.”
Dana returned from his redeployment, had trouble adjusting to drills and was dishonorably discharged prior to committing suicide.
To help prevent that type of situation, the Guard’s new program goes beyond additional mental health assessments. For example, some family meetings are now held in convention facilities instead of armories.
“The primary focus of our Yellow Ribbon program is that it’s a proactive program, not reactive,” Ireland said. “We try to get medical assistance and information to our soldiers before there’s a crisis.”
After Dana’s suicide on March 4, 2007, a task force charged with recommending reforms concluded that many soldiers and their families weren’t aware of the benefits available to them, nor did they know how to access them.
“And that surprised us because we had presented it to them multiple times in multiple ways,” Ireland said. “So we had to conclude they just weren’t listening to us.”
Those briefings occurred in the days immediately preceding a deployment, when the soldiers and their families were so preoccupied with the ordeal facing them that they weren’t terribly concerned about the aftermath.
The Guard now holds an “academy” two or three months before deployment to present that information to soldiers and their families.
“The beauty of it is that we’ve received funding from the National Guard Bureau to put on our academy in a civilian facility and they (the soldiers) can wear civilian clothes to the meetings,” Ireland said. “We can pay for meals, motel rooms, mileage and childcare. That takes the stress off them.”
As many as 60 vendors — ranging from TriWest Healthcare to Veterans Affairs to educational services, finance and legal counseling — may be present over the weekend to explain various programs.
When the soldiers are gone, family readiness units are activated to keep track of their families.
“Family support groups do monthly checks on each family, and we have Webinar training programs that spouses can take from their own homes,” Ireland said in referring to Internet-based training.
Shortly before the troops return, the National Guard sponsors a special reunion workshop so spouses will know how to be prepared.
“Everyone expects that when a soldier comes home, everything will go on as usual,” Ireland said. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case. When the soldier leaves, family life continues for everyone but the soldier, so he and his family have to readjust to life together again.”
In every other state in the nation, soldiers returning home from deployment get a three-month break from drill weekends. In Montana, personnel officers found that the soldiers struggling to readjust to civilian life need their buddies as a support group during that time.
“So we hold drills 30, 60 and 90 days after deployment that are like the academies, except that we focus on family reintegration,” Ireland said. “We have training on marriage enrichment, anger management, symptoms of depression and how to reconnect with your children.”
For soldiers accustomed to driving fast and swerving around potential dangers in Iraq, there’s a session with a Montana Highway Patrol officer to remind them of the civilian rules of the road.
Additionally, mental health assessments are held every six months for the first two years after soldiers return from deployment, and the crisis response teams are on alert for any suggestions that a soldier is beginning to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Our crisis response team has been very effective, and the embedded counselors have been very helpful,” said Wing Command Chief Larry Seibel of the Montana Air National Guard on Gore Hill.
He said the crisis team has intervened to get airmen immediate psychological help in four or five cases during the past year.
“We dealt with one case about a month ago,” Seibel said. “It involved a person who had been to Iraq two or three times and was basically showing a lot of signs of stress at work.
“Putting a uniform on and driving through the main gate brought back all the bad things this person had been through, and there was a meltdown at work during a drill weekend,” Seibel said.
Mental health counselors assigned to the unit took the airman to Benefis Health System immediately, after which counselors at Malmstrom Air Force Base took over.
The patient is now in recovery, he said.
“This situation turned out to be a total success story, but it very easily could have gone the other way,” Seibel said.
Siebel added that the Guard’s crisis response teams are scheduled to get additional training in assessing symptoms of emotional problems and in dealing with crisis situations.
The Montana National Guard also has added a Yellow Ribbon program coordinator and two support positions to assist soldiers and airmen, as well as their families. It also is seeking to hire a director of psychological health and a military family life counselor.
Last year, TriWest Healthcare launched a pilot program in which it assigned mental health counselors to spend one weekend a month at Army and Air Guard armories when the units were at drill.
That worked so well that the National Guard has taken the program over and funded it, Ireland said.
“We see sometimes 50 guys a day and spend between five and 45 minutes apiece with them,” said Rich Kuka, a Great Falls counselor assigned to the Army National Guard in Helena.
He estimated that the prevalence of problems in Montana is about the same as the Rand Corp. national predictions: one in four soldiers will suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and one in three deployed military members will experience either PTSD, traumatic brain injury, major depression or a combination of all three.
“And I’d guess that 99.5 percent of the guys I’ve seen exhibit symptoms of hypersensitivity and hypervigilance,” Kuka said.
Hypersensitivity may mean a soldier hits the ground at a sudden sound or loses control at the sound of a helicopter — for many infantry soldiers, a chopper means a firefight or casualties flown from the scene of a battle.
Hypervigilance may lead a soldier to constantly scan rooftops for snipers, check out apartment windows for suspicious individuals or have a lot of trouble sleeping at night.
Another common symptom is an explosive temper, Kuka said, adding that a lot of infantry soldiers drive their own vehicles at high speeds, quickly avoiding trash or parked cars and swerving around obstacles.
“Everything you hear and read about these guys is true — plus some,” Kuka added.
The Montana National Guard is making its Yellow Ribbon training sessions available to all members of all branches of the military service, including active and reserve members, Ireland said.
“Our funding from the National Guard Bureau makes it possible for anyone who needs that training to attend,” he said, adding Yellow Ribbon is the most cohesive outreach program in the nation.
In a news release last week, Tester said legislation is being prepared to make many of the reforms employed in Montana mandatory nationwide.
“The big thing that Montana has learned the hard way — and now the nation is learning it, as well — is that we just can’t wait for service members’ lives to fall apart before they reach a counselor,” Kuntz said. “By that time, it could be too late or it could be harder to treat.
“This will take the Montana model of face-to-face screening every six months after deployment to the entire country,” he said. “That means that every active-duty, Reserve or Guard service member returning from combat will get the help they need.”
By Remy Benoit
For more information go to Remy’s website Welcome Home Soldier.
Sometimes, sometimes we are greatly blessed by the right voice, the right words, the right book at the right time.
Pulitzer Prize winning, Crusading Journalist, Eric Newhouse has graced us with such a gift at the absolutely right time with his Faces of Combat, PTSD & TBI: One Journalist’s Crusade to Improve Treatment for Our Veterans.
January 2009 presented us with the horror our soldiers face in war, and in coming home, with the simple fact that more of them committed suicide than died in combat. Take a moment, please, and let those words sink in—more deaths by their own hand than by IED’s, than by bullets and bombs.
That fact is an indictment of us, each and everyone on us who endorses sending women and men to war and then ignoring their overwhelming needs in country and when they come home.
To fight a war you must designate an enemy. To have soldiers present themselves to combat you must stir up something that will enable them to confront and, yes, kill, another human being. That something is anger—anger than once turned on is very hard to turn off.
War is, by its very nature, destruction—leveling the civilized work of centuries—ending human life, not only of the soldiers of the enemy, but of those elderly, women, and children that we so euphemistically call collateral damage.
We, hopefully, raise our young to a standard of morality taught by their culture, instilled in them by their religious training. When they are on the field of combat, and in today’s wars that field is just about everywhere they are, with just about no real downtime, that training is catastrophically challenged by the intense need to stay alive. Their entire code of conduct, code of ethics, training of what is right, what is wrong, is turned upside down. They will see things, have to do things, that are the stuff of nightmares, of that proverbial monster lurking at the top of the stairs, under the bed, in the basement of everything diabolical that terrifies us as humans.
We ask them to go into the unknown, to drive down roads blistered with IED”S. We ask them to go into private homes searching for the enemy—private homes with children in them, just like their own. We ask them to pick up and bag pieces, brain matter, of their closest buddies, of civilians, of enemy soldiers. We ask them to suffer Traumatic Brain Injury quietly, and to not speak of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for fear of repercussions, losing benefits, and social and military stigma. We ask them to not question the long term impact of Agent Orange, or Depleted Uranium on their bodies, and possibly the bodies of their still unborn children. We ask them to do a thousand other soul wrenching things and then within just a few hours they are back in the world and asked to get up, have their cup of coffee, and get on with life.
War is insanity; asking them to leave that irrational world and come back and slip back into civilian skin, heart, and soul is irrational. It is also unkind, exploitive, and deadly.
Such is the story, such is the reality, the Eric Newhouse presents us in Faces of Combat, PTSD & TBI: One Journalist’s Crusade to Improve Treatment for Our Veterans as he gives us, word by word, page by heart rending page, the real stories, the sleeping and waking nightmares, of what has bored into those who know, up close and personal, war.
Sit down with Mr. Newhouse and LEARN.
Learn what happens when that anger, denial, pain, terror, loss come home and have no outlets but self, the community, co-workers, and nuclear families.
Learn the fear of forgetting because forgetting might just make you forget the buddy who died bleeding out in your arms, or who scattered into pieces on the ground around you; who splattered onto you.
Sit down with Mr. Newhouse’s words and feel the frustration of months and months and months of waiting, pleading, red-taping their way through to try to find help from the VA.
Sit down with Mr. Newhouse’s words and feel the bullets they eat, the cars they crash, the drugs and the alcohol they down in desperate attempts to end, or at least momentarily quiet, the never ending pain and begin to realize that by our not being there for them, by our not assiduously insisting on immediate, professional, and respectful treatment for their physical, mental, emotional, and soul wounds that we are part of the stuff of their nightmares.
Sit down with Mr. Newhouse’s words and understand the impact of these current wars on National Guard troops who probably never expected to be in any county other than this one—and learn how be deployed, redeployed, and possibly redeployed again has impacted on these people.
Sit down with Mr. Newhouse’s words and lean what it is to be a female soldier who lives with fear of rape from her own comrades in arms.
Sit down with Mr. Newhouse’s words and learn what happens when the given underlying causation of the war, the thing that made the cause righteous, is undermined by the unveiling of the less than righteous statements that caused them to be there in the first place.
Sit down with Mr. Newhouse’s words and feel what the apathy of the public does to the gut of a soldier.
I know, you’re busy. Well, so are they—pulling sixteen hour shifts, with no place safe to rest—pulling sixteen hour shifts where the temps are 140 F, or -3F. They are busy, wearing Kevlar, hoping that their Humvees are or will be armored, and they will not die because they are not properly supplied. They are busy pulling sixteen hour shifts, deployed for whatever numbered time, watching uncontrolled private contractors pull down salaries way, way beyond theirs while they lose homes, wives, children, and their own personal mental, physical, and spiritual stability. Think about this—there but for the grace of no draft, go you.
Is there a way out of this? If the damage is physical, if the war wounds are neurological, if the war wounds are spiritual, can we help to heal them? Montana thinks so, Mr. Newhouse thinks so, and tells you about the changes in Veteran care in his state—about their successes, about their learning what works and what doesn’t—about their problems with the entrenched and often abysmal bureaucracy of the VA they come up against.
Do your homework—LEARN, help, write to Senators, to your Representatives, to your President, to General Shinseki at the VA and insist that we do 100% of what is right for our Veterans. If you do your homework—if you help clear away the mess and smoke of war—if you make sure no war is fought without real justification—you will be helping their coming HOME WORK for them.
And remember this, something we so blatantly forget—the troops, in country or coming home, are US. They are not separate from us—they are our daughters, our sons, our wives, our husbands, our mothers and fathers.
By saving our Veterans, we save ourselves. We save America from a new wave of alcoholism and drug addiction. We save this country from increasing divorce and joblessness and homelessness. We save families from the violence that boils over; violence that causes additional suffering from war related post traumatic stress disorder.
We ease the burden on our jails and prisons.
It’s a lesson we should have learned after 7 million Veterans came home from Viet Nam four decades ago and were allowed to fall, were often pushed through, the cracks—without compassion, without justice, without us there for them.
Learn it.
Say it—Never again!
This time we are here for you—for all of you—and we demand that it be made right for you.