Mentally Unfit

I didn't get to this yesterday, but this country apparently has no problems sending in the mentally ill to fight our battles:

Despite a congressional order that the military assess the mental health of all deploying troops, fewer than 1 in 300 service members see a mental health professional before shipping out.

Once at war, some unstable troops are kept on the front lines while on potent antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, with little or no counseling or medical monitoring.

And some troops who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq are being sent back to the war zone, increasing the risk to their mental health.

These practices, which have received little public scrutiny and in some cases violate the military's own policies, have helped to fuel an increase in the suicide rate among troops serving in Iraq, which reached an all-time high in 2005 when 22 soldiers killed themselves - accounting for nearly one in five of all Army non-combat deaths.

The Courant's investigation found that at least 11 service members who committed suicide in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite exhibiting signs of significant psychological distress. In at least seven of the cases, superiors were aware of the problems, military investigative records and interviews with families indicate.

There are some really heartbreaking personal stories in this investigative report by the Hartford Courant. When all that matters is keeping up troop levels, or making sure your opponents can't make political hay, you lose sight of what your policies do to people. The only surprise is that there haven't been more suicides in Iraq, considering the stress these kids are under, and how many tours of duty they've had to endure (4, 5, sometimes 6)

I hear a lot of people say "well, retention rates are up, so the troop morale must not be all bad." These guys re-up so they can take care of their buddies. I'm not going to pretend to know what it's like in a war zone, but I suspect the term "foxhole mentality" applies when you're, you know, actually in a foxhole with other people. To leave one man behind is to leave them all.

Incidentally these suicides are not counted in official combat death tolls in Iraq. That's disgusting.

Added to that, not only are we putting these kids at risk, we put the whole platoon at risk by sending mentally and emotionally disturbed soldiers onto the battlefield. This is just stupid and callous. The military is so broken right now that a mentally ill soldier is considered better than no soldier at all.

Look at this:

A law passed in 1997 requires the military to conduct an "assessment of mental health" on all deploying troops. But the "assessment" now being used is a single mental health question on a pre-deployment form filled out by service members.

Even using that limited tool, troops who self-report psychological problems are rarely referred for evaluations by mental health professionals, Department of Defense records obtained by The Courant indicate. From March 2003 to October 2005, only 6.5 percent of deploying service members who indicated a mental health problem were referred for evaluations; overall, fewer than 1 in 300 deploying troops, or 0.3 percent, were referred.

That rate of referral is dramatically lower than the more than 9 percent of deploying troops that the Army itself acknowledges in studies have serious psychiatric disorders.

Instead they medicate the hell out of the soldiers, putting them on Zoloft and Prozac and other psychiatric drugs to keep them on the front lines.

Honestly I have no words for my anger right now.