Free Republic

House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting just beginning on CSPAN Hearing regarding Sgt. Tahmooressi who has been held for 6 months in a Mexican prison for a wrong turn into Mexico.

I love warriors. I love being with warriors. I don’t care how badly injured you are. I don’t care if you’re blind. I don’t care if you are missing limbs. You’ve got a warrior’s heart. You’re a warrior, and you need to continue being a warrior. Exodus 15:3 says: “The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name” (NIV). Exodus is pretty early in the Bible. And then in the last book of the Bible, in Revelation 19, it says He’s coming back. As what? As a warrior. It says He’s coming back riding a white horse and...

Documentary airing on CNN looks at the fate of returning Iraq/Afghanistan veterans Soledad O'Brien: Too many bring the war home in the form of post-traumatic stress The documentary follows the lives of two veterans, who cope with return from war O'Brien: The two entered a program that used meditation, equine therapy, counseling

A former Afghanistan Marine who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder has found refuge in rowing the length of the Mississippi river. The trip to the mouth of the river at the Gulf of Mexico took Joshua Ploetz, 69 days, about 50 of them spent paddling. But Ploetz said he needed every inch of the more than 2,500-mile river to paddle away the demons of the war, or at least calm them a bit. Ploetz, 30, from Winona, Minnesota, returned from the war eight years ago after being injured by a roadside bomb, suffering a minor stroke and watching his friends...

The Defense Department’s inspector general will review the academic investigation of plagiarism allegations against Sen. John Walsh. The Montana Democrat is accused of not properly attributing certain material in a paper to complete his master's degree at the Army War College. Carol Kerr, the school’s spokeswoman, said it would launch an Academic Review Board to look into the matter. The results and any recommendations will be forwarded to the Defense Department IG for its “consideration.” The New York Times first reported last week that a review of a 2007 final paper suggests the decorated Iraq war veteran “appropriated at least...

I need help for my dear friend Joshua Eisenhauer Here is a video summary: http://youtu.be/Pvr8SBu0dLg Joshua Eisenhauer is a U.S. Army soldier who suffered severe and debilitating wounds while serving in Afghanistan. Joshua now suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) as a direct result of those injuries and his combat experiences in Afghanistan. The PTSD has caused Joshua to have flashbacks on multiple occasions, including the night of January 13, 2012 when members of the Fayetteville, North Carolina Fire Department came to his apartment in response to a small fire in his apartment complex....

<p>How well can you predict your next mood swing? How well can anyone? It’s an existential dilemma for many of us but for the military, the ability to treat anxiety, depression, memory loss and the symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder has become one of the most important battles of the post-war period.</p>

Just a howler. Introducing a segment on mental illness (and shootings,) the CNN host diagnosed the Fort Hood shooter (whose name he left out) as suffering from "Under-treated post traumatic stress."

Bessel van der Kolk sat cross-legged on an oversize pillow in the center of a smallish room overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur. He wore khaki pants, a blue fleece zip-up and square wire-rimmed glasses. His feet were bare. It was the third day of his workshop, “Trauma Memory and Recovery of the Self,” and 30 or so workshop participants — all of them trauma victims or trauma therapists — lined the room’s perimeter. They, too, sat barefoot on cushy pillows, eyeing van der Kolk, notebooks in hand. For two days, they had listened to his lectures on the...

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.

Video Linky Here

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...