Sounds like he thinks he was conscipted into a war.
Well, right now the USAF is encouraging everyone serving or has served in Iraq and Afghaistan, regardless if they are a busdriver on base, a groundskeeper, or they are handing out tickets at the airport to file for total disability due to PTSD. You can get assistance in the form of pre-scripted statements from your base medical department
I have several of these phonies in my neighborhood. All drawing 100% disability while doing odd jobs under the table.
How can you have PTSD if you are a REMF who never went out the gate? It’s the USAF Medical Branch to the rescue! If not, they have numerous old timers at the Veterans Help Desk who khow the ropes and the right buzz words.
Recent publications suggest that a significant number of our wounded warriors are coming back from desert deployments with PTSD for which there is no perfected remedy. I believe that there is now good cause to
examine a low cost and evidence based based alternative to the use of SSRI’s (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) as the primary protocol. One very significant downside is that the military cannot employ soldiers on
active duty that are using SSRI’s. Another issue might be that SSRI’s do not address the underlying pathology.
The etiology of PTSD is complex and worth a comment. American soldiers are almost always on the heavy side of tissue iron loading (not measured by blood iron studies) and chromium deficiency: this is caused by their diet and
a lifetime without sufficient sweat. Sweat causes excretion of iron/chromium. The iron is readily replaced but the chromium is not.
The excess tissue iron blocks the proper levels of chromium absorption and retention. The deficiency of tissue chromium reduces the efficiency of insulin signaling and the downstream ability for cells to absorb, iron, chromium, glucose, and amino acids.
Iron accumulates in the liver and other organs. The Substantia Nigra Pars Compacta actually consumes iron in the production of neural transmitters and is one segment of the brain that does become iron deficient. When loaded with iron, the liver secretes hepcidin in most healthy individuals. Hepcidin down regulates the deliverable HCl at mealtime. Low stomach acid prevents the complete digestion of meat proteins and the proper absorption of amino
acids through the gut. Americans lose 1% of their muscle mass each year from their early twenties because of this hypoaminoacidemia.
During desert deployments, American soldiers lose significant amounts of iron and chromium in sweat. The blood levels of iron and chromium are lower because of insufficient digestion of meat (low iron and chromium absorption from the gut into the blood, and low
absorption of iron/chromium from the blood into the substantia nigra pars compacta and all other parts of the body).
Optimizing insulin signaling efficiency increases glucose loading into the hippo campos for cognitive enhancements, increases tryptophan loading into the brain for serotonin conversion-increases perception of well being, and increases iron loading into the substantia nigra pars
compacta for dopamine and neural transmitter synthesis. Optimizing insulin signaling efficiency can be accomplished with Intravenous Chromium Chloride or by applying a chromium fortified topical lotion.
http://www.ajcn.org/content/30/4/531.abstract
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/11/2741.full
http://info.med.yale.edu/therarad/summers/Sci198/fromMetalsinMed.pdf
Orally ingested chromium supplements have been proven to be inferior in the optimization of chromium via the transferrin receptor. Modern humans ingest daily approximately 1000 times the amount of iron as they do chromium. The iron easily wins the affinity/abundance battle for space on the safe transport protein transferrin and the chromium is chelated into a useless salt and excreted by the kidney without biological impact. Avoiding the iron rich environment in the gut is of paramount importance in optimizing the biological impact of chromium. It is the transdermal delivery of chromium that makes such a dramatic impact on optimizing the insulin signaling transduction event. This is accomplished in a dramatic and an immediately observable way by optimizing the bio-availability of trivalent chromium.
I used to wonder why someone like Kurt Cobain, who seemed to have everything going for him, could even suffer depression. That is until I suffered a bout of depression, too. (Tuns out that mine may was probably caused by the antibiotics I was taking.)
Don’t feel stigmatized. God never meant for men to have to see death at all, much less the horrible visions of war. I have never been in battle but after watching both “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific”, I can understand how even the strongest man can break under the stress of watching their friends and innocents die.
I found out many years ago that when you are physically burned that you can either salve it and cover it and prevent yourself from feeling the burn, but eventually, you are going to have to just let it hurt. You are doing what you should, dragging out these suppressed feelings and dealing with them and hopefully, helping others deal with theirs, too.
“Bottom line is that I experienced sights and “Bottom line is that I experienced sights and smells that no human being should ever have to experience”
If we took this sort of thing seriously, wouldn’t that mean every single one of our ancestors, or at least a majority of them, from back in the bad old days, would’ve been hysterical looneys unable to operate as normal hyman beings. Except they were, most of them, normal human beings. So what’s the deal? Maybe, just maybe, our brains can heal themsleves, and our culture (you know, morality, religion, family, community, etc) was perfectly fine, or fine enough anyway, before psychiatry came along and informed us we weremonsters and unable to deal with what normal huimans deal with.
I mesmells “Bottom line is that I experienced sights and smells that no human being should ever have to experience”
I always figured that ifthat “Bottom line is that I experienced sights and smells that no human being should ever have to experience”
I always fuino human being should ever have to experience”
I’ve always thought
” I mesmells “Bottom line is that I experienced sights and smells that no human being should ever have to experience”
I always figured that ifthat “Bottom line is that I experienced sights and smells that no human being should ever have to experience”
I always fuino human being should ever have to experience”
I’ve always thought
“
Please ignore this part of the post. It was an accident.
First of all, thank you for serving your country.
I am married to a Vietnam veteran who in the last 3 years of his life, began suffering tremendously with an autoimmune disorder. His weakened muscles have caused him to not be able to hold down a full-time job.... something he has been able to do since he was 14 years old. The experiences that he has sedated over the past 40 years - either by alcohol or ummmm other things - began to not be enough to contain the nightmares he suffers on a nightly basis. This stigma of being a loser and riding on the gubmint teet is still something he has to deal with. Some people can be so cruel. I am most grateful that our VA truly recognizes the incredible service our men and women endure and am proud that he can gain some treatment for this so-called PTSD. A lot of the Vietnam veterans are experiencing a latent effect of Agent Orange and it is difficult to prove that it is service related. It disgusts me to no end that our military gets treated in such a demeaning manner.
I hope things begin to go well for you, but just know that I am one who is most proud of you.
I had a friend just like you from Vietnam. He too suffered PTSD and heard the voices, saw the people and the invented movies that played in his mind over and over.
He had two purple hearts and a bunch of other medals and commendations. I never knew about them until I helped his father clean out the house.
This happened when the demons and monsters that preyed on him for 30 years finally killed him.
He had been an exemplary mentor to others suffering from PTSD, but one day he decided to stop the medication he was taking that made him stable.
He still went to the classes but he stopped taking the pills that helped him cope because they made him feel dead.
One day he said some funny things and we all laughed at his jokes. Thing is he was planning his exit the whole time and telling us. We just didn’t know.
At his memorial, with the VA and the section that deals with PTSD, his doctor and mentor broke down so hard in tears it took him 30 minutes to compose himself enough to tell us my friends work was beyond amazing and it is so unexplainable that he died.
You see, he made one phone to another friend, leaving a voicemail about how everything had been so wonderful between them and it was a beautiful day.
Approximately 30 minutes later the demons that had haunted him for 30 years decided to kill him and he put a gun to his head and ended the pain.
PTSD is very real and the things those brave men do and see are unbearable for the rest of us.
Thank you for your story.
Sir, have you yet been introduced to the 501c that Army Col. Antonio Monaco founded? It is found at www.patriotoutreach.org and Col. Monaco’s free gift to all Vets, even civilian veterans of any war can be accepted in a truly anonymous fashion by being downloaded from his site. Rave reviews are coming in about it, without exaggeration. The 82nd. Airborne ordered thousands of free copies last year, I think it was, for a segment of their command headed for Afghanistan, so I was told and I heard the ordered more.
That terrorism went down at Ft. Hood, someone there heard of the colonel’s “Coping Strategies” and phoned, saying “send us all ya got” sort of thing.
God bless you and I hope you go read the colonel’s message about it, as he can explain it better than I ever could.