Skip to main content

Veterans and Mental Illness

On a sultry June morning in our national’s capital last Friday, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. 

Scores of people moved silently along the Wall, viewing the names of the men and women who died in that war.  Some stopped and took pictures.  One group of men about my age surrounded one name for a photo.  Two young women posed in front of another, perhaps a grandfather or great uncle they never got to meet.

It is always an incredibly moving experience to visit the Wall.  It treats each of the people it memorializes with respect. There is no rank among those honored.  Officer or enlisted, rich or poor, each is given equal space and weight.

It is a form of acknowledgement and respect for which many veterans still fight.
Brave Vietnam veterans returned from Southeast Asia to educate our nation about the effects of war and violence.

I didn’t know anything about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I entered the Connecticut Legislature in the late 1970s.  I had only vaguely heard of “shell shock” from which some World War I and II veterans suffered.  At that time, the condition, like the way we thought of other mental illnesses, suggested some sort of stigmatizing weakness inherent in the individual.
Vietnam veterans changed our thinking.

They knew that PTSD was a real mental illness caused by violence. 

It took courage and strength to deliver this message to a nation not ready to hear it.  We didn’t know then that the violence of war, the violence of neighborhoods and families, and the trauma of natural disasters cause this illness.

As a result of their advocacy, the National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study (NVVRS) was conducted in 1983.

It found that a startling 830,000 Vietnam Veterans (26%) reported symptoms of PTSD, and many thousands more had other mental illnesses, such as Depression.  As the National Center for PTSD summarizes, a re-analysis of the data twenty years later suggested that up to a staggering 80% of Vietnam veterans reported at least some symptoms related to PTSD.

The Persian Gulf War introduced a new illness, Gulf War Syndrome, to our lexicon.  It is characterized by both physical and mental health problems. Only 8% of Gulf War veterans have been diagnosed with PTSD, possibly because their exposure to violence was of shorter duration.  But nearly 38%, or 263,000, Gulf War veterans sought treatment from the VA alone for illnesses and chronic conditions, many related to Gulf War Syndrome.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, an estimated 10% to 18% of returning Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans have PTSD, and up to 25% will have Depression.

Mental illness is as devastating in veterans as it is in any population.  According to the National Coalition on Homeless Veterans, on any given night 107,000 veterans are homeless.  76% of these men and women have behavioral health illnesses.  140,000 are imprisoned.  Half of these have mental health problems.

While I was in Washington, I attended a dinner with my wife Pam and her colleagues at Mental Health America and its affiliates around the country, at the completion of their annual conference and before the ringing of their symbolic freedom bell, forged from the chains once worn by people locked in mental institutions.  The 2011 Clifford Beers Award winner, Dr. Patricia Deegan, a survivor of schizophrenia, spoke of the courage of those who refuse to give in to the diagnosis of serious mental illness and to let it define them.

The Vietnam veterans who lobbied me had such courage, and refused to let PTSD define them.

We have fought three seemingly endless ten-year-plus wars in the last fifty years, and another one which caused significant physical and mental damage to its participants.  Millions of veterans and their families have been affected by PTSD.

Thousands of others who have been exposed to violence, terrorism, and natural disasters also share this experience.  
This should teach us an important lesson.

Mental illness doesn’t cause violence, but exposure to violence causes mental illness.

One of the things I love most about America is that although we are so diverse, we share a common purpose.   

The people whose names are on our national monuments - Washington, Lincoln, and the 58,272 on the Wall – remind us that this common purpose involves an entitlement to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

June 27 is PTSD Awareness Day.  It is a good day to remind ourselves why the bells of freedom mean so much to us all, especially the 7% of all adult Americans with PTSD.

The people whose names are on that Wall are remembered for sacrificing to give the rest of us a safer, more secure life.  They would not have forgotten those who came home with mental illness.

To receive an email notifying you of the publication of new Our Health Policy Matters columns, please email gionfriddopaul@gmail.com.  For a collection of hyperlinks used in past columns, please visit the Data Source Links page.

Comments

  1. As a practicing psychiatrist, I must laud your work in putting together this excellent summary. I still view with dismay our VA's efforts to handle the volume of cases coming to them in ever increasing numbers bourne out to me by the accounts of honestly frustrated vets who speak still of irrational bureaucratic hurdles they have to 'breach' to obtain access to services. But I also realize from my few colleagues I know still in the VA system, that their resources are still woefully inadequately funded by our budget slashing ethos cursed Congress who still are the hypocritical impediments to our Veterans.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anxiety disorders are one of the most common types of mental health disorders.Anxiety can occur in many different forms depending on what trigger precipitates the anxiety response. Some people experience an anxious response out of the blue, reflective of panic disorder, while others respond anxiously to a specific trigger, such as heights or closed places, and may be diagnosed with a specific phobia.
    -----------------------------

    psychologist new york

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scapegoats and Concepts of a Plan: How Trump Fails Us

When a politician says he has “concepts of a plan” instead of a plan, there is no plan. And yet, that’s where we are with Donald Trump, nine years after he first launched a political campaign promising to replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better, nearly four years after he had four years to try to do just that. And fail. Doubling down during Tuesday’s debate, he claimed he had “concepts of a plan” to replace Obamacare. Really? He’s got nothing. In fact, he sounds just like Nixon sounded in 1968, when he claimed he had a “secret” plan to get us out of Vietnam. That turned out to be no plan at all (remember “Vietnamization?”) and cost us seven more years there and tens of thousands of lives. The Affordable Care Act, about which I wrote plenty in this blog a decade or more ago, wasn’t perfect. But it was a whole lot better than what we had before it – and anything (save a public option) that has been proposed since. Back then, insurers could deny coverage because of pre-exi...

Anxiety and the Presidential Election

Wow. Could the mainstream media do anything more to raise our anxiety levels about the 2024 election? And diminish or negate all the recent accomplishments in our country? Over the past three-and-a-half years, our nation’s economy has been the strongest in the world. Unemployment is at record lows, and the stock market is at record highs. NATO – which last came together to defend the United States in the aftermath of 9/11 – is stronger than ever. Border crossings are down. Massive infrastructure improvements are underway in every state. Prescription drug costs are lower. We finally got out of Afghanistan – evacuating more than 100,000 U.S. citizens and supporters – with just a handful of deaths. Inflation – which rose precipitously in the aftermath of the pandemic – has come back down, and prices in many areas have even begun to decline. And yet, all the media commentators can talk about these days – and they are not “reporters” when they are clearly offering opinions to frame the...