Terrible, isn't it...of course they attribute it to not enough troops...so they (read EVilBushyhitler) send these poor mentally ill soldiers back to battle. SHAME.
But the reporter seems to have gone to the Tom Cruise Scientology School of Psychiatry expert for quotes:
Some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for “extended deployments.”
“I can’t imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on (antidepressants), when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal,” said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection. “You’re creating chemically activated time bombs.”
Well, let's start with the Alliance for Human Research Protection...they have a website with all the "ain't it awful" stuff about psychiatric medicine and links to "ain't it awful" sites on Vaccines...Sharav is not an MD or PhD...she lists nothing on her CV under the board of directors, merely tells us to do a "search google" for her history...well, I did, and all I got was "ain't it awful" articles, where she hyperventilates about the evils of vaccines, drugging people, and Bush...so her expertise is not treating people, but giving quotes to the media. And what is more disturbing, there is no membership list or source of funding listed on their extensive web site...HMMM....
Now, I know that such watchdog groups do protect the vulnerable from becoming guinea pigs..(their website claims Wesley Smith as a supporter).but I am also old enough to remember when there was no anti depressant medications, and the only anti psychotic medicines we had were Thorazine. The miracles of psychotropic medications is one of the miracles of the twentieth century. Overused? sometimes. Side Effects? Of course. Don't work? Once in awhile.
But you could say the same thing about digitalis or Penicillin...
The danger with depression is that the most risk is not when people are depressed (they lack the energy to commit suicide) but in the recovery phase. So ALL anti depressants are associated with suicide...and in the days before anti depressants, it was when people started to improve that you had to really watch them...but if you look at the statistics, the suicide rate has actually gone down in teenagers as the use of anti depressants went up...even though the societal problems have gotten worse. So statistically, they work. And the patients tell us they work.Do we see problems with these medicines? Of course. Do we overuse anti depressant drugs for "minor" problems? Probably...but as the poem says: "the mind has cliffs of fall...hold them cheap, those who ne'er hung there".
It's easy to complain, and point out problems, but to do so and ignore the blessing of such medications to the lives of millions of people is....the only word I can think of is "evil"...They feedl so self righteous, because they never see the family of a person who refused to take the medicine and ended up psychotic, depressed and unable to function, or even dead...
As for soldier suicide, the rate is not higher in Iraq than elsewhere...which is a dirty little secret.
The suicide rate for young men is 10/100 000 in civilians...
And one million people from the US armed forces have served in Iraq or Afghanistan .....over three years.
And yet the Army reports 67 self inflicted deaths over three years...(PDF)
The other clueless part is the implication that mentally ill and stressed soldiers were kept on duty because of a troop shortage...NOT TRUE.
LINK
In WWII, they were sent back, and many developed what we now call "survivor guilt"...and the army found they actually did better if you rested them and gave them short time treatment and then reintegrated them into their unit.
I am not minimizing the terrible scars of war, nor the pain of mental illness.
What I am pointing out that this article is lazy journalism. The form of the article was decided before it was written. The quotes are from a non specialist whose expertise is providing quotes about the evil of psychotropic medicines, not a by a psychiatrist who has treated people in battle. And even the Army experts quotes seem to be cut and pasted out of a longer conversation to fit the idea behind the article, not to show light on a complex problem
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