Dr. Sally Satel dumps on PTSD Vietnam Veterans.....AGAIN!

[SEATJERKER]

...

...posted up during the early morning hours here in a long while,...

...shunned releasing the thoughts that drive one from their "resting position" while wiping the shakes away,...

...I have had changes occur through the last few years, and last few weeks to days which eat away at my core, and after reading her "diagnosis", I like to give her a gentle slap,...

...I said before that I felt like I was the poster boy for PTSD due to being a "Non-war-combative" victim of the dreaded disease,
like Chris, and many others without an understanding of the why's, and what's, my help only came after blowing the proverbial gasket, and leaving myself to wonder why it took so long to get out the feelings buried from long ago,...

...again I'm "awake, and up", and not in a good way, but rambling won't change anything, the pain never goes away, It just rears it's ugly head as it wishes,...

...

[1CAVCCO15MED]

Curits, Tom, Chris we are all so much alike that even our wives and /or girlfriends are amazed when we are together. Yet Tom was an airbourne infantryman living in SC, I was a medic living in TN, Curtis a ejection seat repairer that was not in combat from NY and Chris was on a destroyer and lives in WA. We are very different people but WE ARE ALL THE SAME. That is what the History Channel and Patriot Files showed me. And it goes on and on with others that come here. I can't remember jack squat, I have very little organization and judgement. I was a fairly competent emergency type person until my brain fried. This person I am sure needs medical care every now and then. I challenge her to put up or shut up. I'll be her personal nurse for free. I might even throw in being her driver. Nothing wrong with me. Anyone else need a chauffer/nurse?

[MORTARDUDE]

A brother from Vietnam called me today. He served with the 1st Cav in 1967 and repaired helicopters. He saw a lot of death and destruction while there, from cleaning blood and guts out of helicopters, to watching soldiers close by destroyed by mortar rounds...I had met him when I was in the lock up ward in the VA hospital for 3 weeks in Oct. 2004. I had enjoyed talking to him while there, and had given him my phone number, and told him to call me sometime. It has taken him almost 17 months to make the call. We talked for an hour and he promised he would go to the Vet Center and talk to them, and get some help.
As it happens, he only lives a few houses down from where we lived in the early 70s for 4 years, in in Mississippi... When we finished talking on the phone we were both in tears.

Larry

[SEATJERKER]

...

...Sometimes I wish I would have died in that shooting,...

...It has taken the last 25 + years of my life, and turned it to shit in so many ways, could write for weeks on this box, but my arm cramps up from the hole you can launch a quarter through, along with the wrist that blew out, the elbow tendon, and shoulder on the right side thats torn, they give me hearing aids, and free batteries for the rest of my life, but have been rated at 0% since 93,...

...50 % PTSD, 20% for my arm, and 10% overall, and 0% for both ears for a combined of 60, I'd give it all to charity if the pain would go away, but like many others have masked it with a fair amount of booze, trying never to step over the coherent line,...

...They have put me in for indivdual unemployability, and all the paperwork, including former employer's statements have been filed, and like the rest of everyone, the wait,...

...I don't care about the rating, I just wish that I could have lived a semi normal life holding a semi normal job, while having a semi normal relationship long term, but no umpteen jobs, 3 marriages, and no future in sight except to depend on the "system" to support what should have been a normal hardworking dedicated honest life,...

...like many, all because i did what duty called me to do, have been accused of being lazy, and worthless, just fed up with everything, worked my ass off in the dealerships, only to be passed over as I don't play well with the other children, they only see you when your "awake" through the day forcing your self to try to proceed, never the times staring at the alarm clock 5-6 times a night when "sleep" says not tonight either asshole,...

...It's one loud bang, or bump that sends your adreniline skyrocketing, and you can't come down for days, sapping you for days after that, and they wonder why your productivity is down, It turns mad into tears, tears in to screams, screams into restlessness, restlessness into exhaustion, and the circle just meets up with the other turn,...

...I'm on my 20th hour today following maybe 8 hours rest in the last 3, some weeks are better then this one, but it just seems like the candle is burning at all 3 ends,...

...all I ever wanted was to be a normal human being, this isn't living, it's treading water forever,...

...edit, oh yea, and then there is the issue of living with the disbelief from the system all these years, still getting "disability", and yet the fuking Air Force board for clearing military records still won't acknowledge any of the proof that have been shoved up their ass, they can all rot in hell,...

...

[Gimpy]

like the NYT got our message!

Last week Dr. Sally Satel wrote an OpEd piece in The New York Times that painted an unrealistic and untruthful picture of veterans who suffer from PTSD.

Now...it's payback time!

In an unusual move The Times has published several letters that take Dr. Sally to task.

Good work to all who wrote!!!


Letters printed below:

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For Veterans, a Longer Battle


To the Editor:

Re "For Some, the War Won't End," by Sally Satel (Op-Ed, March 1):


I served in Vietnam in the early 1960's, when we were supposed to be "training" the Vietnamese to establish a democratic South Vietnam. We did everything but. I did not fight (I was a chaplain), but the trauma of those days is still with me.


For more than 40 years I carried that burden alone in nightmares, sleeplessness, weeping, trying to tell no one because it was not "manly." Only when a Houston police officer picked me up one night when I was sleepwalking and directed me to a therapy group at a local veterans' hospital could I even talk about the trauma.


Now, 45 years after my service, I can talk about it because it has become "manly." It became accepted after the Persian Gulf war and is accepted in this war.


Now you know why so many Vietnam veterans are coming forward only now. It just wasn't "manly" to admit such a "weakness."


Peter J. Riga
Houston, March 1, 2006

>>>>>>>?


To the Editor :


Sally Satel wants us to believe that there are veterans who try to scam the Veterans Affairs Department by requesting benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder long after their wartime experience.


What Dr. Satel actually does is expose a system that pits veteran against veteran in a competition for scarce resources. This is how our supposedly troop-supporting, grateful nation rewards its men and women in uniform.


My brother served in Iraq. He is one of the luckier ones and is home now, but the recovery from his experiences is extremely complex and will clearly take a lifetime to unpack. I hope that whenever he needs any of the benefits he was promised when he enlisted he will get them.


Which veterans deserve their benefits? All of them!


Laura Costas
Silver Spring, Md., March 1, 2006

>>>>>>>>?


To the Editor:


Sally Satel mentions a report by the inspector general of the Veterans Affairs Department on compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder. But that report did not fault the veterans involved. Rather, it found premature ratings and sloppy record-keeping by overworked and undertrained V.A. staff members.


After intense review, the secretary of veterans affairs determined that there was no evidence of widespread abuse.


Combat is the root of all trauma for war veterans. This is often worsened by the V.A.'s labyrinthine bureaucracy, by prejudice and by those who question the veterans' integrity and the validity of their neuropsychiatric wounds ? without offering a shred of evidence.


Many Vietnam veterans dealt with their post-traumatic stress disorder by becoming workaholics. But their symptoms are now re-emerging after retirement as they sit home and relive their trauma by watching a new war on TV.


Dr. Satel minimizes the problem of thousands of legitimate claims that have been denied veterans because of the great difficulty of finding supporting documentation to verify the stressor.


John P. Rowan
National President
Vietnam Veterans of America
Silver Spring, Md., March 1, 2006

>>>>>>>>?


To the Editor:


Sally Satel's calibrating approach to veterans' benefits is all too familiar from precincts like the American Enterprise Institute, where she is a resident scholar. Coming from a psychiatrist, a supposed healer, it's unseemly.


Instead of fretting about conserving resources for the "truly deserving" veterans by strictly scrutinizing all veterans to determine those who are not "truly deserving," I suggest that we support the troops by bringing them home and treat veterans as generously as we treat, say, Halliburton and the oil companies.


John Moran
New York, March 1, 2006

>>>>>>>>?



To the Editor:

As a former Marine officer who served in the Vietnam War, I take issue with Sally Satel's conclusion that "we must be skeptical of veterans who file claims as retirement approaches."


Post-traumatic stress disorder came into bloom in my life 25 years after the trauma. It took five years of therapy before I was able to deal with the demons. I had been a successful lawyer, elected official, father and husband, but the disorder took its toll.


I've met traumatized veterans and urged them to seek help. Not many did. They too were "successful," but haunted. I thought that some day it would catch up with them. The stresses of old age would do it.


We are old, proud veterans. Few who need help get it. Let us not turn our backs on those who do. Time does not make post-traumatic stress disorder any less powerful. It does not make sense to deny it because it is "decades after" the war.


Tom Brush
Ann Arbor, Mich., March 1, 2006

>>>>>>>>?


To the Editor:


Even the certainty that some veterans' claims of reactivated war trauma are false does not excuse the failure to treat other veterans who are suffering.


Bureaucratic policy-making and speculative notions about those who "deserve" treatment are trivial (though money-saving) objections to our duty to help men and women who have fought our wars.


Rosemarie Arbur
Klamath Falls, Ore., March 2, 2006


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To the Editor:


Dr. Sally Satel is nothing more than a misguided neoconservative ideologue "hired gun" in a doctor's white lab coat.............specifically "hired" to shoot down and destroy PTSD benefits for this nations sick & disabled veterans.


Satel's lack of attention to factual, historical evidence as suppiled by the The American Psychiatric Association (APA) -- and to any real analysis of data collected by the Department of Veterans Affairs, along with many respected military service organizations such the Disabled American Veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, and the Vietnam Veterans of America -- is unacceptable in any sort of rigorous argument.


The APA is the national medical specialty society representing more than 37,000 psychiatric physicians nationwide who specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of mental and emotional illnesses and substance use disorders. They recently reported that patients with severe PTSD increased 42% from 1998 to 2003, while expenditures for VA treatment increased only 22% during that same time. Veterans who are service-connected for PTSD use VA mental health services at a rate at least 50% higher than other mental health user groups . It is essential that identified PTSD programs be maintained consistent with the provision of P.L. 104-262, so that veterans may reap the benefits of specialized treatment delivered by clinicians who are experts in addressing the unique needs of veterans with PTSD and its associated co-morbid conditions.


In spite of Dr. Satels approximately 5 years at a VA hospital in Connecticut in the early 90's, there is no CAVC case mentioning her whatsoever.


In the one court case I could find where she was hired by a plantiff as an "expert" witness in a discrimination lawsuit. Dr. Satel?s credibility and so called expertise was so unreliable that her findings had to be stricken by law without waiting for cross-examination. The court went on to say, "she lacks an extensive background in medical school admissions; her work has not been subjected to any peer review; and her opinions are not based on a methodology that can be tested. Accordingly, her views lack the indicia of reliability required under law."


Dr. Satel appears to be nothing more than a ?mouthpiece? for sale to any neoconservative cause. Any objective examination of her so-called "credentials" as well as her "motives" should hopefully diminish her power in her fight against veterans.


In any case, she is nothing more than a disgrace to her 'profession' and as well to this country. Anyone with her apparent influence and ability to persuade this nations political leadership to abandon and harm this nations sick and disabled veterans should hang their head in shame!


Steve Johnson
Tarpon Springs, FL. March 1, 2006


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[sn-e3]

Thank You Gimpy for printing the Real Rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say. there is more to a book then its cover and some really good come backs to her artical.

[Gimpy]

right Chris.................There IS more to a book than just its' cover.

We have GOT to try and stop this piece of crap Sally Satel from continuing her and the American Interprise Institutes "agenda" of attacking veterans benefits!

[Gimpy]

Veterans take on the recent 'shenanigens' going on about PTSD.

Great article!


-----START-----


The politics of PTSD

Thursday, March 09, 2006 - Bangor Daily News


By Michael Uhl


Recent news articles have reported that nearly 216,000 veterans diagnosed with PTSD - post-traumatic stress disorder - receive benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Most of these veterans are from the Vietnam period, and many, including myself, were granted their disability ratings only during the last decade. Since 1999, the VA's PTSD benefit payments have jumped 150 percent from $1.7 billion to $4.3 billion annually.


Clearly, since the disorder's recognition in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), PTSD - with its long silent history under other names from soldier's heart to combat neurosis - had finally become a cost of war to be reckoned with.


Now, with reports that the percentages, if not the absolute numbers, of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suffering from PTSD may exceed that of their Vietnam era counterparts, VA budgetary outlays for care and treatment of this malady are likely to skyrocket even further.


Naturally, the merits of a given veteran's case for PTSD care and treatment should be judged on the best scientific evidence and screening methodologies available. It is the need based on science that should dictate the size of the VA's budget to accommodate veterans traumatized by war, and not the size of the budget that shapes or manipulates diagnostic criteria to reduce the PTSD population among returning war veterans.


Concern has mounted in recent months among veterans and their advocates that it is money, and not science, that may set the VA's PTSD -related mental health agenda in the years ahead. Not only could this revised agenda have a potentially disastrous impact on the well-being and readjustment of today's returning veterans, but it has already caused considerable anxiety among veterans who have been rated with PTSD in recent years, and who fear their benefits may be unjustly curtailed.


Apparently, the VA's ill-conceived plan to review the cases of thousands of veterans compensated for PTSD since the mid-1990s has been scuttled, owing to negative political fallout in Congress. But now the VA seems bent on pursuing its plan to limit future PTSD cases through a new strategy that will pit one prestigious scientific body against another, and which even Congress may have less influence to monitor or challenge.


The VA has contracted with the Institute of Medicine, a component of the National Academy of Sciences, to conduct a sweeping reexamination, not only of all medical and scientific literature on PTSD to date, but on issues related to PTSD's "treatment, prognosis and compensation." Such an initiative, given how much remains to be learned about PTSD, may be timely as long as objective science holds sway over politically motivated cost-cutting.


At the same time, the VA initiative threatens to second guess, and potentially delegitimize, the longstanding authority of the American Psychiatric Association under whose aegis ptsd research and treatment has been studied and advanced for more than a quarter century.


Anyone familiar with PTSD as researcher, clinician or long-term client, is well aware of the competing hypothesis around the exact nature of the disorder, not to mention the rival claims of relative efficacy for one therapeutic method vs. another in the treatment of PTSD's persistent and aggressive symptomatology.


Psychiatrist and noted author Robert Jay Lifton, a pioneer in the early efforts to gain recognition for a condition initially observed in Vietnam veterans as post-Vietnam syndrome, and later defined systematically by the APA as ptsd, has long recognized the powers of human resilience among some individuals to survive horrifying episodes of war-related trauma. That's the good news. Where such individual hardiness is not present, many are not so fortunate, and the psychic damage incurred by such victims can lead to social dysfunction, social pathology, or even suicide.


Most veterans I know who are rated with PTSD, including myself, will tell you that after living with this condition, often for decades, their symptoms never go away, but that with self-vigilance, proper care, and the support of loved ones and friends, their symptoms can be managed and kept at bay. Given this well-documented collective experience, the most troubling aspect of the VA-mandated Institute of Medicine's PTSD review is not just the hidden assumption that something is wrong with the existing PTSD science or benefit adjudication criteria, but the introduction within the policy debate of an expectation that combat trauma can be prevented.


Concepts like "survivability" and "resilience" offer hope of coping mechanisms to returning veterans who undergo disturbing changes of behavior because of their wartime experiences. Whereas the idea that an individual's response to trauma in warfare can be "prevented" prior to or immediately following the traumatic event, seems suspiciously convenient for those who would bend science to a conservative vision of social policy. Ironically, in this scenario, support for the troops in the field does not translate into support for veterans at home.

In July 2000, I had occasion to interview Daniel King, Ph.D., head of the Behavioral Science Division of the VA's National Center for PTSD. Dr. King is a quantitative psychologist. He and his team performed statistical analysis on data furnished by clinicians working with PTSD clients throughout the VA system. One unexpected finding King had begun to notice around the time we were talking, was a quantum leap in cases of "late-onset" PTSD. These were veterans, in their fifties like me, who were entering the VA system for the first time in the mid to late 1990s.


In fact, the VA's own surveys show that, of the vast majority of Vietnam veterans known to suffer from PTSD, less than one-fourth have ever benefited from VA-related services. Under the circumstances, it seems as if the increased burden in compensation payments that the VA is experiencing should have come as no surprise. Prior to its official recognition, moreover, PTSD was frequently referred to as "delayed stress," while the prefix "post" in the current usage would seem to suggest, logically at least, that the syndrome's appearance can't be tied to a fixed time line.


In my own experience, PTSD is an insipid disease, one which I went to great lengths to deny in my own life for decades. Denial, in fact, was my biggest enemy, in the sense that I failed to grasp for years that PTSD, perhaps all mental illness, has a life of its own, and is not subject to conscious regulation like the normal ups and downs most people experience.


When I realized that PTSD often controlled me, and not the other way around, I was able to finally confront my condition, and learn how to better cope with and manage my symptoms.


Without the safety net provided by the VA, that would not have been possible.


Michael Uhl, Ph.D., a writer and a charter member of Veterans for Peace, lives in Walpole. He is also a member of the Disabled American Veterans. He led a combat intelligence team in Vietnam with the 11th Infantry.

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[Gimpy]

front for a while........................