DeJa-Vu PTSD: Safety Net Opens and Outreach Increases

Safety net of veteran mental health care for PTSD goes beyond the work at Fort Harrison

Jul 1, 2012 - The sky is dark with a blanket of despair.

There's no hope. There's not a future. It's no longer living — only survival.

For Scott Cohen, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is likewalking through a field of land mines in a dense fog, wearing a 100-pound pack on his shoulders. Each step is a struggle. Every step, a potential land mine.

It's his worst nightmare — a flashback — and he wakes in a cold sweat.

It's not just the visions from the nightmare, but the taste that remains on his palate; the smell that lingers under his nostrils.

It brings Cohen, an Operation Enduring Freedom veteran and mass communication specialist, back to Afghanistan in 2007.

"Your anxiety is so high and off the charts, you feel like you're crawling out of your skin," Cohen said, one week after graduating from the VA Montana Health Care System's six-week residential PTSD Trauma Recovery Unit at Fort Harrison. "The only emotion that you can show — because it's raw — is anger, because it's the easiest."

The fight against PTSD is becoming increasingly widespread as awareness of the disorder grows and as thousands of returning soldiers arrive home with similar hidden wounds beneath their skin.

It's now a national mandate (started by the Montana National Guard) to screen every soldier for signs of PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, but as the safety net opens and outreach increases, Veteran Affairs hospitals across the country will have to weather the storm.

VA Montana's mental health facility is now two-thirds open, and eight therapy groups — or cohorts — with eight people each have made their way through the residential PTSD Traumatic Recovery Unit since the fall of 2011.

But the treatment is not reliant solely on VA hospitals. Community organizations such as Veteran Centers, VA Clinics, and outreach groups like NAMI Montana (National Alliance on Mental Illness) and Vets4Vets are spreading the net wider to provide treatment and research for future veterans.

PTSD is simply a new name to the age-old story, one that dates back to the origin of war. It's known as Soldier's Heart, War Malaise and Shell Shock, and it builds with continued confrontations of fear, trauma and death. read more>>>