WASHINGTON, March 6, 2008
GIs Battle Depression In Afghanistan
Report: Troop Morale Up In Iraq; Mental Health Problems Rise For Soldiers On 3rd, 4th Tours
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A wounded police officer is looked after by his colleagues as U.S. soldiers look on near the site of an explosion in Maiwand, Afghanistan, in this Feb 24, 2008 file photo. A suicide attacker hit a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, March 3, 2008, destroying a guard post with American soldiers inside. (AP Photo/Allahuddin Khan)
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And in a recurring theme for a force strained by its seventh year at war, the annual battlefield study found once again that American soldiers on their third and fourth tours of duty had sharply greater rates of mental health problems than those on their first or second deployments, according to several officials familiar with the report.
All spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the findings ahead of the study's release Thursday.
The report was drawn from the work of a team of mental health experts who traveled to the wars last year and surveyed more than 2,200 soldiers in Iraq and nearly 900 in Afghanistan. In the fifth such effort, the team also gathered information from more than 400 medical professionals, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health workers serving with the troops.
Officials said they found rates of mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and post-combat stress were similar to those found the previous year in Iraq, when nearly 30 percent of troops on repeat tours said they suffered a problem.
It was unclear how the new data might relate to a recent report showing that as many as 121 U.S. Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007, an increase of about 20 percent over the year before. The preliminary figures released in January said that there were 89 confirmed suicides last year and 32 deaths that were suspected suicides and still under investigation.
"Although we have had many successes, there are also areas of concern," Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, said in testimony prepared for a congressional committee hearing.
Soldiers in Afghanistan had rates of mental health problems similar to those in Iraq in 2007 with the exception of depression, officials said the new study showed. The percentage reporting depression in Afghanistan was higher than that in Iraq, and mental health problems in general were higher than they had previously been in Afghanistan. They gave no statistics, but a 2004 study conducted in the states with troops before and after they deployed to Afghanistan found that roughly one in 10 developed a mental health problem requiring treatment.
Though U.S. troops suffered their highest level of casualties in both campaigns last year, that came as violence was decreasing in the five-year-old Iraq conflict and increasing in Afghanistan, now in its seventh year.
Troops' mental health problems are linked directly to the amount of exposure they have to combat, and officials said that last year the level of violence was more pronounced in some places of Afghanistan than it was in Iraq. Some 83 percent of soldiers in Afghanistan reported being exposed to mortar fire and similar action as fighting heated up against Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, compared with 72 percent in Iraq, according to the study.
Having troops spread out and more isolated over the rugged terrain in a less developed Afghanistan made it necessary at times to bring soldiers in by helicopter when they needed mental health care, one official said. After the survey was taken, mental health professionals were dispersed more to put them nearer to the forces they serve, he said.
Officials said other findings included:
Sending mental health advisory teams to do extensive surveys and focus groups in the combat theater of operations was a groundbreaking effort when started in 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq. The goal is to assess how troops are doing at the war front and how well behavioral health services provided by the military are working for the force.
Extensive reports have been produced after each survey and they have led directly to changes in the way services are delivered in the combat theater.
Among changes considered this year is whether more mental health workers might be needed at the war front. Since all troops there over the past year have been serving extended 15-month tours instead of 12 - and a larger number were there for repeat tours - officials questioned whether the ratio of mental health workers-to-troops that was appropriate in 2003 and 2004 is appropriate now, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to Schoomaker, told a recent news conference.
The number deployed to Iraq has been pretty much consistent throughout the war - averaging about 200 psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and technicians, Ritchie said.
© MMVIII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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- all of the shooters were on these drugs... just think what is going to happen. Internet is a good place to share information and meet friends. I recently found a nice web site called pubspa.com where you can meet friends who have same interest in beauty care, massage, wellness and spa treatment. You can also share blog, video, game, photos, etc with people from all over the world. Unlike other online dating sites where you have to pay membership fee, this site is totally free. I already made several interesting friends there.
- Reply to this comment
- Nancy_Naive - You and me.
- Reply to this comment
- And all these guys are coming back to civilian life after witnessing some really scary stuff...
- Reply to this comment
- No way!!!!!!!! Imagine depression in our military. Whodathunk????
My coworker is still having nightmares from Iraq and he''s been home for a year. I have the HIGHEST respect for our soldiers and am disgusted at what they are paid and the amount of b.s. they have to go through to get healthcare services after putting their lives on the line for all of us.
Now the bombing in NYC at the military post there in the middle of Times Square. Mark my words that this year, 2008, we will begin to see suicide bombers in this country. It''s only a matter of time.
BRING OUR TROOPS HOME!!!!!!!!!!! - Reply to this comment
- In the 1960s, the dung-eating electorate supported the war to enrich Brown&Root...Over 55,000 Americans died for this and tens of thousands more were wounded and psychologically maimed. The Vietnam War was based on the same kind of lies that the current Stupid Peoples'' War is based upon...we hear the same lame arguments...to be anti-war is anti-American... that we need more laws and police to control individuals and fight drugs...while AIR AMERICA was shipping in the drugs every single day.
The War Pig Regime in Washington and the Oligarchy that runs it are evil incarnate. They want more war...more debt...more sacrifice for THEIR NEW WORLD ORDER AND THE FURTHER DESTRUCTION OF OUR NATURAL RIGHTS ENSHRINED IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE US CONSTITUTION....and they have a draft bill ready to pass after the elections...so our children will fall into their clutches completely...to be drugged and abused and murdered as they are sent to oppress the natural rights of other living beings. - Reply to this comment
- Could you imagine being on your 4th tour in a country where your not welcome. Engaging an enemy that has the support of the people you are allegedly protecting. Listening to the Right in America that never want you to leave, and the Left condemning you for being there in the first place. Packing body bags, seeing limbs severed, seeing collateral damage, and being where feeling like a human is an occupational hazard. Having families torn apart from prolonged separation. The military solution to the breakdown of our civilian leadership is to put the soldiers on Prozac.
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- Support Your Local School Shooters! Make sure the supply of armed, trained and chemically altered veterans is there to augment the chemically altered school shooters and suicides so that anti-gun wags will have an argument to disarm the population.
The Washington Regime''s CIA is already bringing cocaine and heroin into the United States while fighting a drug war to suppress any competition. Now, they are creating chemically altered human beings who under the influence of these drugs have an altered state of mind, consciousless and deadly.
You''ve already seen this in the school massacres...all of the shooters were on these drugs... just think what is going to happen after the Regime finishes scr*wing these guys and the VA really p*sses them off....Now patch the vaccines, the madness promoting ethyl-mercury in them and the brain inflammation that it causes...and the vaccine itself causes by heightening the immune response within the brain. It is a deadly brew and it is coming home to you!! - Reply to this comment
- The repeated tours deplete them...this justifies the administration of the anti-depressants...the anti-depressants and the rest of the chemical cocktail turn them into souless and consciousless killing machines in the theatre of operation and at home...where, if they have a psychological diagnosis, they will be forced to give up their second amendment rights.
The relatively unpublicized results of British studies show these ''anti-depressants'' to be no more effective than a sugar pill. Obviously, the Regime wants to keep these expensive mind-altering, suicide promoting, chemicals on the market...to keep soldiers out their murdering puppies and torturing animals... and the civilian men, women and children who own them...not to mention their wives and children when they get back to Fort Bragg. - Reply to this comment
- and yet again...you are to easy lefty
Posted by jwind11 at 10:46 AM : Mar 06, 2008
And yet again...You obviously are much easier. You voted for bush, I didn''t. Only 320 days left! Enjoy it while you can, Fool. - Reply to this comment
- The military is VERY desperate. I got two recruiting phone calls last week. I did not return the first, but felt obliged, after the second from the Air Force, to call the recruiter and explain that I had already been in the Army 40 years ago. But, if they really could find a job for this old phart, I would consider it and my wife would, most likely, be all for it!
- Reply to this comment
- You never had one to begin with, Punk.
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Posted by leftyintexas at 10:01 AM : Mar 06, 2008
and yet again...you are to easy lefty - Reply to this comment
- jwind11
The Greatest Generation throughout America votes Democrat, and has since Ronald Reagans second term. Now since you a Southerner and a Fascist, I can not speak for the White Trash south of the Mason-Dixon line. I do know that you people are so full of ********, that your eyes are brown. This I do know as fact.
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Posted by neoconism at 09:42 AM : Mar 06, 2008
another wrong "fact" by you.....possible there are more? i would bet so - Reply to this comment
- John McCains prescription drug abusing trust funded wife named Dog is proud to be an American, although she will not explain why this is. Perhaps she is sheltered from buying $3.50 gasoline? Or maybe it is because she likes the USA''''s Military Welfare program and the no-bid contractors who have stolen billions for the Iraqis and the US Taxpayer? Or could it be the tax cuts for the rich that have run the US debt up to $9.5 TRILLION? OR MAYBE SHE LIKES THAT HER HUSBAND SUPPROTS GW BUSH ON EVERYTHING? Or how bout our jobs have been outsourced overseas to the lowest bidder? The USA has the worst education system in the entire industrialized world. John McCAins wife named Dog, a proud hypoctrit of an American.
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Posted by neoconism at 09:38 AM : Mar 06, 2008
and this has what to do with this story? - Reply to this comment
- Nothing changes. Kids have been dying for generations. Look at the children around you and picture them in uniforms going to war somewhere to end some injustice, except their own. Rah! rah! Once more .. Nothing changes. Humans are nuts!!! jbgallo2
- Reply to this comment
- Nothing changes. Kids have been dying for generations. Look at the children around you and picture them in uniforms going to war somewhere to end some injustice, except their own. Rah! rah! Once more .. Nothing changes. Humans are nuts!!!
- Reply to this comment
- Nothing changes. Kids have been dying for generations. Look at the children around you and picture them in uniforms going to war somewhere to end some injustice, except their own. Rah! rah! Once more .. Nothing changes. Humans are nuts!!!
- Reply to this comment
- I rest my case
posted by jwind11 at 09:36 AM : Mar 06, 2008
You never had one to begin with, Punk. - Reply to this comment
- During his endorsement of McCain, Bush boasted that he will soon be back in Crawford with his feet up. He has also boasted that history will be the judge of his policies. He probably hoped to be dead before the verdict of historians is delivered but unlike Congress historians will not be timid about passing judgement on an administration so inept it makes the Keystone Cops appear to be exemplars of rectitude. Some have already labeled this as the worst administration in history. If Congress allows Bush and Cheney to ride off into the sunset unimpeached after what they have done to the young men and women sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, the rights of citizens, and the Constitution then Congress too will deserve the opprobrium of historical judgment.
- Reply to this comment
- If I''''m not mistaken, FDR would qualify as a''''whiny wimp'''' and a ''''pathetic lib'''' by your standards. He was elected four times as our President. You are an ignorant clod who seems to be the type the Republicon party thrives on. Only 320 days left! Enjoy!
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Posted by leftyintexas at 09:26 AM : Mar 06, 2008
I rest my case - Reply to this comment
- There would not be a united state of america if the citizens that lived thru ww2 ("greatest generation") were whiny wimps like you pathetic libs.
posted by jwind11 at 08:58 AM : Mar 06, 2008
If I''m not mistaken, FDR would qualify as a''whiny wimp'' and a ''pathetic lib'' by your standards. He was elected four times as our President. You are an ignorant clod who seems to be the type the Republicon party thrives on. Only 320 days left! Enjoy! - Reply to this comment
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