1 in 7 Iraq vets may have PTSD

Posted by Joshua Holland at 6:36 AM on February 13, 2007.

I've been struggling with a nasty bug and I was starting to feel a bit sorry for myself, as men tend to do after being laid up for a few days. But then I saw this, and got a little bit of perspective:

In an extensive, months-long investigation, "The Real Cost of War," in Playboy magazine's March issue (on newsstands and at http://www.playboydigital.com/ Friday, February 9), journalist Mark Boal discovers American troops fighting in Iraq and Iraq war veterans are not receiving the mental health care they deserve, specifically when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Boal spoke with numerous mental health experts, government sources and former military personnel who paint a disturbing picture about the government's handling of PTSD.

Boal found that the Department of Defense (DOD) diagnoses about 2,000 cases of PTSD a year. Yet according to a landmark study conducted by Army researchers and published in The New England Journal of Medicine, PTSD rates for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are running between 10 and 15 percent. That means one would expect to see the military diagnosing 13,000 to 20,000 cases of PTSD.

Former government officials agree there is a problem. "PTSD is being underdiagnosed on a fairly wholesale level," says Dr. Robert Roswell, a former undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

But why?

According to sources in the Pentagon and former officials of the VA, doctors working for the VA and DOD are being pressured to limit diagnoses of PTSD in order to save the military money and manpower, reports Boal.

Budget pressures may be the motivation to discourage diagnoses of PTSD, according to the article, which reports that when the DOD submitted a war budget to Congress, the line item for mental health casualties was simply left blank. "DOD never prepared for a long war; it never prepared for an occupation," says one senior congressional staffer. "Now we're seeing the third thing it didn't anticipate: what to do with the soldiers when they come home. Now they really don't have the money."

Iraq War veteran Christopher Carbone said he wouldn't mind a decrease in his medical benefits if it meant that additional federal dollars would be used for armored Humvees on the battlefield.

But Carbone, a survivor of an improvised explosive device attack in Iraq in October 2005, couldn't help being a little jarred when he learned the Bush administration planned to cut funding for veterans' health care by 2 percent in 2009 in order to balance the federal budget by 2012.

"It's kind of surprising," Carbone, 28, of North Haledon, said Monday. "It's one of those things that you always expect to be taken care of after everything you do."

After a moment of consideration, Carbone resorted to a soldier's resolve.

"One thing I learned in the Army, in the lower ranks you never really grasp the whole picture," said Carbone, a first lieutenant in the Army National Guard.

After a $4 billion increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head, even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly -- by more than 10 percent in many years. White House budget documents assume that the veterans' medical services budget -- up 83 percent since Bush took office and winning a big increase in Bush's proposed 2008 budget -- can absorb a 2 percent cut the following year and remain essentially frozen for three years in a row after that.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.