Long way back for U.S. veterans with mental disorder

- Upon returning home in February 2009 from his two deployments in Iraq, Kevin White, a 29-year-old former U.S. infantryman now living in Somers, Montana, started having nightmares and flashbacks. Only then White realized that he had developed a kind of mental disorder called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is usually associated with anxiety, sleeplessness and short-term memory loss. "That's when I knew that I needed help and needed to talk to somebody," White told Xinhua in an interview. White is just one example of a large number of U.S. veterans suffering from PTSD after returning home from combat operations in Iraq or Afghanistan during the past decade. It has become a growing and current sociological trend in the United States to deal with the illness among war veterans. Two events led to the PTSD suffered by White, who was injured during an ambush in Iraq and currently undergoing physical therapy at a local hospital run by the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA). "In my first deployment in 2005, I saw a suicidal bomber near Telfar, Iraq," recalled White, "A woman carrying a baby walked into a public square. The baby had a bomb strapped to it and the woman detonated the bomb. Over 100 people died." "The second event was when my unit was ambushed and I was injured. A piece of shrapnel went through my shoulder and into one of my lungs," he said. At one point in the decade-long U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, almost 50 percent of all airmen, marines, sailors and soldiers who were deployed to one or both countries reported having both depression and PTSD. A VA report published at the end of 2011 showed that over 250,000 veterans who were in VA clinics or veteran centers received some sort of treatment for PTSD. As American military personnel who have served in either of the two wars return to their civilian lives, these PTSD-plagued veterans are learning to cope with their mental disorder. PTSD in soldiers has existed for centuries. Some characters in the ancient Greek poet Homer's epic poem "The Iliad" were believed to have had the illness. It was known as "shell shock" after World War I and as "battle fatigue" after World War II. "With the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, what we're seeing with the majority of PTSD soldiers is due to IEDs (improvised explosive devices)," said Dr. James Tourila, a PTSD specialist in St. Cloud, Minnesota. "In previous wars you had professional soldiers getting injured, but in the cases of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, you have people who were truck drivers, for example, in civilian life, getting injured due to IEDs," he said during a telephone interview with Xinhua. "These people treat their PTSD differently than professional soldiers who get injured," he added. A person can develop PTSD after seeing a traumatic event. Evidence exists that actual physical damage occurs in the brains of people with PTSD. "PTSD tends to manifest itself anywhere from six months to two years after the trauma," said Phil Budahn, spokesman for the U.S. VA in Washington D.C. "We know that if somebody intervenes as soon as possible after a soldier sees a traumatic event, it is better for that soldier, in regards to helping the soldier's mental health status." VA hospitals in the United States have become more proactive in treating cases of trauma and PTSD. At the James A. Haley VA Hospital in Tampa, Florida, there are programs to assist both veterans suffering from PTSD, as well as their immediate family members. Such programs are common at other VA hospitals in America as well. The National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (NCPTSD), established in 1989 by the U.S. Congress, has created the Iraq War Clinician Guide, which is available online to clinicians and veterans with PTSD alike. Odrys Toro, 36, a former U.S. army truck driver who was stationed in Kuwait but often drove from there to Iraq, developed PTSD upon her return from the battlefield in 2004. "Everything about my overseas duty affected me. The whole experience of being over there caused my PTSD," said Toro, who is now working at the medical administration department of the James A. Haley VA Hospital. "For me, the PTSD didn't happen overnight. I began to get the usual first signs of PTSD -- nightmares, the fidgets, and inability to sleep at night," she said. Like most PTSD-plagued veterans, Toro said she is very sensitive to loud noises. "Car exhaust systems backfiring; large crowds shouting -- all of that bothers me. Most male and female veterans with PTSD that I know hate the Independence Day on July 4, because people set off firecrackers and fireworks, and they all explode loudly," she told Xinhua in an interview. Unlike most PTSD veterans, Toro refuses to take any sort of drugs, "because I'm divorced and I live alone with my three-year-old son and I can't put myself in any possible dangerous situations because of him." When Toro first went to the James A. Haley VA Hospital in 2005 to see a doctor for her PTSD, few programs or mental health support systems existed for women sufferers of the disorder, which was then thought to strike solely male military veterans. This antiquated viewpoint has now changed, according to Joy Ilem, spokeswoman for the Disabled American Veterans organization. "Anybody can be in danger of developing PTSD, no matter who you are. We're seeing more and more women returning from (military assignments) in Afghanistan or Iraq who have depression, or other post-traumatic mental health problems," she said. For the first time in the U.S. history, a large number of women were critically injured during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We have never seen so many cases of females with double loss of limbs, or blinded, or other types of seriously dehabilitating injuries, and this gives these women vets unique mental health issues that male vets don't have," Ilem said. Another concern for PTSD veterans is that many states, under budgetary pressure, are considering budget cuts to numerous mental and social health programs including some VA-affiliated programs. This is currently the case in the state of Florida. "If they cut the money to these programs, there's going to be many vets with PTSD who will be walking around with problems," warned Toro.