Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

WASHINGTON -It was a diverse group of veterans that showed up last Monday morning at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Two retired generals, a blind man, three men with prosthetic legs and one in a wheelchair. They gathered in the historic Roosevelt Room, where Teddy Roosevelt's Medal of Honor is displayed in a corner. For some, it was their first visit to the West Wing. When President Barack Obama came into the room, he shook their hands, thanked them for their service and asked each for his opinion.

Washington - To a soldier who has been in Iraq, the sights, sounds and smells are familiar: the pop of an AK-47, the flash of a bomb, the stench of cordite. The location, however, is not. Here, in a small, windowless room at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, researchers are using the latest video game technology - plus a smell machine and a vibration platform - to help patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Known as "Virtual Iraq," the treatment may help many soldiers who don't find relief from medication or traditional psychotherapy.

Gov. Martin O'Malley and Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski told a group of soldiers yesterday that the government must do more to help returning troops by increasing mental health funding and cutting bureaucracy in existing programs. During a meeting at the 5th Regiment Armory in Baltimore, both officials heard accounts from about a dozen members of the Maryland National Guard who had emotional and financial problems after returning from deployment overseas. About 1,500 members of the Guard are expected to return to Maryland in the next six months, a wave that is likely to strain state-funded integration programs.

A proposal by the O'Malley administration to help returning war veterans deal with emotional and psychological problems triggered by their service got a sympathetic hearing yesterday, but key legislators warned that the state might lack the money to meet what all agreed is a critical need. Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, an Army Reserve officer who did a tour in Iraq in 2005, told members of the Senate Finance Committee that the state needs to help veterans suffering from brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, which are contributing to high rates of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, joblessness, homelessness and family breakups.

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Veterans Affairs, which promotes its special programs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in returning soldiers, spends little on those programs in some parts of the country, and some of its efforts fail to meet some of the VA's own goals, according to internal reports obtained by McClatchy Newspapers. In fiscal 2006, the reports show, some of the VA's specialized PTSD units spent a fraction of what the average unit did. Five medical centers - in California, Iowa, Louisiana, Tennessee and Wisconsin - spent about $100,000 on their PTSD clinical teams, less than one-fifth the national average.

Four years ago when President Bush declared major combat over in Iraq, the first troops began to come home to an insidiously invisible war: the psychological trauma caused by their combat experience. In a study of soldiers returning home after that first year of war, one in eight was found to have post-traumatic stress disorder or some other mental disorder, according to a Walter Reed Army Institute of Research study reported last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- The nightmares that tormented Sgt. Walter Padilla after returning home from Iraq in 2004 prompted extensive treatment by Army doctors, an honorable discharge from the military and a cocktail of medications to ease his suffering. But Padilla, 28, could not ward off memories of the people he had killed with a machine gun perched on his Bradley fighting vehicle. On April 1, according to the authorities and friends, he fatally shot himself in his Colorado Springs home.

Miami -- Suspected al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla is competent to stand trial on terrorism charges because he understands the case against him and has shown himself capable of assisting in his defense, a federal judge ruled yesterday. The decision by U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke was a victory for the government, which has alleged in a three-count indictment that Padilla was part of a North American terror cell that recruited, trained and supported Islamic militants seeking to carry out acts of violence.

SAN DIEGO -- None of this is really happening, but the experience is almost overwhelming in "virtual Iraq." The Humvee plows along a desert road. The engine rumbles underfoot, and Blackhawk helicopters whirl overhead. A sandstorm blows in, and insurgents pop up and start to shoot with sickening blasts that shatter the windshield. Is that the smell of burning rubber? Those sensations of war are being fed into a special helmet, goggles and earphones. They are conjured by a computerized virtual reality developed in part by gaming engineers and psychologists at the University of Southern California and being tested, among other places, at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego.

The California Nurses Association reported that in the first quarter of 2006, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs "treated 20,638 Iraq veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, and they have a backlog of 400,000 cases." A returning soldier has to wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability benefits, and an appeal can take up to three years. This is unacceptable and reprehensible. The saying "War is hell" doesn't begin to describe how horrible it has been for tens of thousands in our military in Iraq and Afghanistan.