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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is launching a $26 million program to help military personnel with psychiatric disorders using electronic devices implanted in the brain. The goal of the five-year program is to develop new ways of treating problems including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are common among service members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan."We've seen far too many times where military personnel have neuropsychiatric disorders and there's very few options," says Justin Sanchez, a program manager at DARPA.DARPA is known for taking on big technological challenges, from missile defense to creating...

Combat veteran Kryn Miner, 44, served 11 deployments in seven years. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury after a bomb blast in Afghanistan in 2010 threw him into a wall. It was one of 19 blasts he endured over two decades of service to his country. On April 29, Kryn died after being shot by his teenage son, who was acting in defense of himself, his mother and his siblings because Kryn had threatened to kill them and pulled out a gun. Prosecutors ruled that it was a justified shooting, absolving the teen from facing...

In the inner city, a health problem is making it harder for young people to learn. The Centers for Disease Control said 30 percent of inner city kids suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The CDC said these children often live in virtual war zones. Doctors at Harvard said they actually suffer from a more complex form of PTSD that some call “hood disease.” Unlike soldiers, children in the inner city never leave the combat zone. They often experience trauma, repeatedly.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) "It's really not anyone else's business to tell someone when they are mentally and emotionally ready to deal with things," says Bailey Loverin, a University of Santa Barbara (UCSB) junior who authored a resolution to mandate that professors issue "trigger warnings" before presenting material that might trigger memories of past traumas in students. Feminist and social justice blogs popularized the concept of the trigger warning, with writers encouraging each other to label posts that might trigger flashbacks to sexual assault or domestic abuse. As the popularity, and scope, of the trigger warning idea grew, some bloggers began listing potential...

The world needs to see this.

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This Vietnam veteran has found a pretty unique way to treat his PTSD. He served for nearly 5 years and nothing seemed to be helping, but he's found a way that has been a big help for him. http://americanmilitarynews.com/2014/04/video-vietnam-veteran-found-unique-way-treat-ptsd/

President Bush is front and center in the news this week, a position he hasn’t frequently occupied since leaving office five years ago, stepping back into the spotlight to shine a spotlight of his own on post-9/11 veterans and his fight to take the “Disorder” out of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “We’re getting rid of the D,” he said. “PTS is an injury; it’s not a disorder. The problem is when you call it a disorder, [veterans] don’t think they can be treated. “An employer says, ‘I don’t want to hire somebody with a disorder.’ And so our mission tomorrow is...

Army machine-gunner Caleb Daniels lost his best friend and seven other members of his unit when a Chinook helicopter — one he was meant to be on — crashed in Afghanistan. The 2005 tragedy haunted him when he returned to his home in Savannah, Ga. At night, a tall, shadowy figure crept into his room. Sometimes the Black Thing would threaten to kill him; other times it would choke his dead best friend. The dark figure, a “Destroyer demon,” punished him, he said, “for killing and for living.” Without answers — his PTSD diagnosis offered little explanation — he went...

Roman Tritz’s memories of the past six decades are blurred by age and delusion. But one thing he remembers clearly is the fight he put up the day the orderlies came for him. “They got the notion they were going to come to give me a lobotomy,” says Mr. Tritz, a World War II bomber pilot. “To hell with them.” The orderlies at the veterans hospital pinned Mr. Tritz to the floor, he recalls. He fought so hard that eventually they gave up. But the orderlies came for him again on Wednesday, July 1, 1953, a few weeks before his...

RESEDA (CBSLA.com) — Authorities on Saturday identified the suspect they said shot two people — killing one and leaving the other critically wounded — at an apartment complex in Reseda. The shooting occurred just after 6:40 p.m. Friday. Officers with the LAPD’s West Valley unit said they arrived at an apartment in the 7500 block of Canby Avenue and found two people with gunshot wounds. In another apartment, they said they found a suspect bleeding and acting irrationally. They said the suspect, who was bleeding from his hands and arms, was taken into custody. Witnesses said the man was screaming...

It’s a breakthrough that could help thousands of American soldiers returning from dangerous deployments. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe they may have discovered a way to create a vaccine that could prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “What it’s going to do is that they’ll still have perfectly strong memories of the event. They just won’t have the bad health consequences,” said Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of neuroscience with the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The key is a lesser-known hormone produced by the stomach called ghrelin. “One of the really interesting things about ghrelin that was...

The U.S. military is retracting a claim made to “60 Minutes” that Guantánamo guards suffer nearly twice as much Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as combat troops. “There are no statistics that support the claim of twice the number of troops diagnosed with PTSD,” said Army Col. Greg Julian of the U. S. Southern Command in response to a query from the Miami Herald. Southcom has oversight of the 12-year-old detention center, including the consequences of duty there on the thousands of troops that have guarded the Guantánamo prisoners. At its height, the prison held about 660 men at the sprawling detention...

In economics, the first lesson I teach my pupils is the lesson of things that are seen and things that are not seen. Actions produce some effects that are readily apparent and others that are not. This truth applies to military veterans. Many return from their service scarred. Sometimes those scars are visible, as in the case of Ronny Porta, about whom I wrote last spring, or the Vietnam vet with whom I shared a poignant experience many Veterans Days ago. Other times, the scars are invisible. The psychological wounds may be more common. A close friend and a cousin...

Some say it's not an opiate painkiller like Oxy, but Klonopin. And doctors are doling it out like candy, causing a surge of hellish withdrawals, overdoses and deaths.You could argue that the most dangerous “drug” in the world is the venom from a jellyfish known as the Sea Wasp, whose sting can kill a human being in four minutes—up to 100 humans at a time. Potassium chloride, which is used to trigger cardiac arrest and death in the 38 states of the U.S. that enforce the death penalty is also pretty deadly . But when it comes to prescription drugs...

Dream Theater's new self-titled album on Roadrunner Records arrives tomorrow (Sept. 24), and to celebrate Billboard is hosting the exclusive U.S. premiere of the video for the song "The Enemy Inside." The clip, which was directed by Bill Fishman (the Ramones, Steve Ray Vaughan), marks the first time in a long while that Dream Theater has created a strictly conceptual video to illustrate one of its songs. Instead of seeing the band, viewers will witness the torment of a soldier who's struggling with reintegrating into his life back home due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). http://youtu.be/kivbHHazxFQ Guitarist John Petrucci says...

The massive repository of genetic material is poised to advance research—just don’t bother asking for your samples back Inside DoDSR Image: Dina Fine Maron SILVER SPRING, Md.—Nestled inside a generic-looking office building here in suburban Maryland, down the hall from cable-provider Comcast, sits the largest blood serum repository in the world. Seven freezers, each roughly the size of a high school basketball court, are stacked high with row upon row of small cardboard boxes containing tubes of yellow or pinkish blood serum, a liquid rich in antibodies and proteins, but devoid of cells. The freezers hover at –30 degrees Celsius—cold...

Despite his self-proclaimed history of mental instability and post-traumatic stress, one-time congressional candidate and perennial activist Adam Kokesh is organizing a pro-gun rally in which marchers will walk with loaded rifles into Washington from Virginia. “This is now a call for mass civil disobedience on July 4th anywhere in Washington, D.C.,” Kokesh wrote on the event’s Facebook page. “We will march with rifles loaded & slung across our backs to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated & cower in submission to tyranny.” Kokesh, who served as a Marine artillery officer and reservist, attended Claremont McKenna...

In last article I wrote about surviving combat and how I experienced it during my year in war. Today I write about the aftermath. Survival is not only hard on your body but can also kill you inside. So you survive but you are just empty shell. You all heard of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) but I call this just being dead inside. But this does not have to be like that. First let me tell you about Alek. I know Alek for many years now, I met him during one hiking trip I did with my survival group...

The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse. Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries. The comparative rigidity of the adult brain results in part from the function...