Fuel on the fire: adding more war vets to the nation’s PTSD population

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http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/17/18473061.php
Fuel on the fire: adding more war vets to the nation’s PTSD population
by Monica Davis
Thursday Jan 17th, 2008 11:23 AM
The military has always been a way for minorities to escape the lack of opportunity in the civilian workforce and now, many minority vets are paying a heavy price.
Victims of violent crime, catastrophic events and war, children in particular, have a high incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as noted by several major research investigations. War, and its civilian counterpart, violence, are hell, and both leave psychological scars, which may affect generations of veterans, civilians and their families.

Children who experience sexual molestation, physical or psychological abuse, are at greater risk for suicide, drug/alcohol abuse, and self-destructive behavior that other children.

According to a fact sheet on PTSD:
· In the United States, about 8% of the population will have PTSD symptoms at some point in their lives.
· About 5.2 million adults have PTSD during a given year. This is only a small portion of those who have experienced a traumatic event.
· Women are more likely than men to develop PTSD. About 10% of women develop PTSD compared with 5% of men (Veteran’s Administration)

Women are more likely than men to develop PTSD for all types of traumatic events, except sexual assault or abuse. When these traumas occur, men are just as likely as women to get PTSD (National Center for PTSD Fact Sheet, VA) Ethnic vets, blacks, Native Americans and Hispanic soldiers bear PTSD disproportionately. One study found that Native American veterans were more likely to have been treated for alcohol-related disorders than other veterans, but they were no more likely than other veterans to have been treated for drug or psychiatric problems. (Ibid)

Native American vets often have additional exposure to PTSD, the main reason of which is their probable exposure to the aftereffects of the often-abusive church run “Indian Schools,” whereby Native American children between the ages of 5 and 15 were indoctrinated in the residential school system for more than 140 years. Many of the students were tortured, physically and sexually abused, murdered and/or used for medical experimentation, a situation which has generated a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit in Canada.

For many survivors of these schools, the sight of a nun, even as an adult, was a traumatic experience. One such survivor told an interviewer, “A little while ago, I was supposed to attend a Halloween party. I decided to dress as a nun because nuns were the scariest things I ever saw,” says Willetta Dolphus, 54, a Cheyenne River Lakota. The source of her fear, still vivid decades later, was her childhood experience at American Indian boarding schools in South Dakota. (Amnesty International)

Either as students, or grandchildren/children of students of residential schools, many Native American soldiers, like their black and hispanic counterparts, often went to war carrying a load of psychological trauma from childhood, problems which had a high probability of being exacerbated by additional war-related trauma and stress.

The additional burden of war and violence added to an already volatile mix. Hence, for the veteran as a whole, if he or she came from an ethnic background—Native American, black, or Hispanic, additional risk factors for PTSD exist.
For many veterans, VA facilities are far away. Distance from a facility increases problems with transportation to and treatment for PTSD, particularly for Native American veterans who live on reservations in the Great Plains.

Northern Plains American Indian Veterans expressed a high degree of satisfaction and comfort with a weekly telepsychiatric treatment program for rural, isolated, American Indians with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. (VA)

However, depite the satisfaction level expressed by Native vets regarding their “distance counseling,” Native Americans are over-represented in the nation’s homeless population, and present a challenge to the VA in designing culturally sound treatment programs, as this article from the Boston Globe notes:
Mental health workers are looking for new ways to help Native American service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In some parts of the United States, specialists are combining modern treatments with traditional healing methods, employing medicine men, participating in sweat lodges, and asking tribal elders to encourage veterans to seek professional medical help. (Boston Globe, 9-17-07)

Nearly three-quarters of Native Americans in uniform have been deployed to the Middle East in the last six years. The Globe notes that,
At least 18,000 of the 22,000 Native Americans currently in uniform had been deployed at least once to Iraq or Afghanistan as of July, according to the US Department of Defense. Recent Army studies have found that up to 30 percent of soldiers coming home from Iraq suffer from depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. The studies did not include other branches of the military. (Ibid)

Like their Native American counterparts, black vets are over-represented in homeless, drug and alcohol abuse, prison and other at risk populations. Native American and African Americans have a long history of distrust of the federal government and its agencies. Reports coming from several sources note that many Native vets have little trust and less faith in the federal Veteran’s Administration. They distrust the government so much that they will not seek help from the VA, even where that help is close at hand, which it often is not.

But the efforts fall short of reaching most Native American veterans because many of them do not trust the federal government and the services it offers, say some Indian veterans and mental health workers who work for the VA. (Ibid)

An undersecretary in the VA testified that Native American veterans were four times less likely than other vets to seek and receive VA health care. (Ibid) Moreover, as we discussed earlier, with regard to ‘culturally inherited risk factors’, problems associated with racism increase risk factors for veterans’ PTSD.

Race-related stressors and personal experiences of racial prejudice or stigmatization are potent risk factors for PTSD, as is bicultural identification and conflict when one ethnically identifies with civilians who suffered from the impact or abuses of war. (Ibid)

Race related stressors, combined with exposure to violence, physical, mental, or sexual abuse, have already laid the groundwork for dysfunction in many minority populations. Adding war related stressors to the mix has generated an increase in the homeless and substance abuse population as a whole, particularly within the Native-American and African-American community.

In one piece of literature directed toward minority veterans, the Veteran’s Administration put it this way:
Being an ethnic minority in the military can expose you to certain traumatic experiences. In such cases, seeking appropriate professional assistance can help you understand and treat your symptoms or other problems. Also, your race or ethnicity may influence your rate of exposure to, and/or reaction to, traumatic events. (Ibid)

The over-exposure to ethnic minorities to PTSD in civilian life, combined with war experience has generated new populations of homelessness. More than half of all homeless veterans are African American. Women veterans of the Iraq war have begun showing up in the nation’s homeless population.

"On any given day, as many as 200,000 veterans (male and female) are living on the streets or in shelters, and perhaps twice as many experience homelessness at some point during the course of a year," according to the Department of Veterans Affairs website. The Interagency Council on Homelessness estimates that about 47 percent of the homeless veterans served in Vietnam. (CNN)

What many of these reports can not predict is what will happen when the war ends. We have had more than 1 million US service personnel serve in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last six years. Historically, veterans comprise 13% of the nation’s population as a whole, but are 33% of the American homeless population. What happens when the war ends? What happens when they all come home?

Even if they are declared “disabled,” they still face an uphill climb to survive, both psychologically and economically. The “pension” often isn’t enough to live on, as one veteran told a New York reporter. More than a million disabled veterans receive less than $400 a month from their VA disability pensions, and the application process is often too complicated for many dysfunctional veterans to complete.

Almost half of America's 2.7 million disabled veterans receive $337 or less a month in benefits, according to the VA's Veterans Benefits Administration. Fewer than one-tenth of them are rated 100 percent disabled, meaning they get $2,393 a month, tax free." And only those who receive that 100 percent benefit rating can survive in New York," said J.B. White Jr., a 36-year-old former Marine who served with a National Guard unit in Iraq. (New York Daily News, 6-25-06)

Monica Davis is a columnist, author and public speaker. She has written hundreds of articles on civil rights, environmental justice, economics and politics. She is the author of 5 books, including Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building the Future in Black America
Author website: http//http://www.lulu.com/davis4000_2000
Book description:
A century ago, the segregated South had a deep secret--black farmers owned the majority of farmland in the region. Then came the 1910 Census results along with an organized effort to drive black farmers off the land. Through lynching and intimidation, and predatory use of federal farm loan programs, hundreds of thousands of black farmers, 90% of African-American farmers, were driven from the land through a 60 year orgy of lynching, murder, intimidation and theft. Many found refuge in factory towns and became middle class through factory work, especially in the auto industry. Others gathered in segregated ghettos in the nation's urban hell holes and continue to fuel the nation's prisons. Many claim the goal of federal farm policy is to drive family farmers out of business in favor of corporate agri-businesses.
http://www.lulu.com/davis4000_2000

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