Implications for combat veterans as the APA considers revisions to the DSM-V.
This past week, the American Psychiatric Association was meeting in Philadelphia for, among other things, discussion of proposed changes to next year’s DSM-V. Among the presentations in the military track of this year’s conference, the top listed presentation is titled “Combat Related PTSD: Injury or Disorder?”
Ron Capps of Time Magazine’s blog, and others, are convinced the new name for Combat Related PTSD must include the word “injury” in order for soldiers to take their diagnosis seriously. According to John Gever at Medical News:
Some in the military and veterans community had lobbied to replace the word “disorder” in PTSD’s name with “injury,” as less pejorative and permanent-seeming. The workgroup on trauma- and stressor-related disorders did not do so, but they did rewrite its definition considerably—in particular, adding 9 dimensional assessments to the checklist criteria and splitting PTSD in children from PTSD in adolescents and adults.
Despite Assistant Secretary of Defense Jonathan Woodson’s recent memo to all military branches about the overprescription of antipsychotics like Risperdal for PTSD, military figures with close connections to Big Pharma were also scheduled presenters at the APA meeting. More than half of the authors of the DSM have links to the pharmaceutical industry, says Peter Alhous at New Scientist. The implications to military personnel are grave.
The drugs prescribed to troops suffering with PTSD are not just dangerous, says Martha Rosenberg in “The Mind Druggers” on Counterpunch and on her blog on AlterNet. These “pharmaceutical cocktails” are capable of making troops with traumatic brain injuries and other signature Iraq/Afghanistan injuries worse through alterations in brain chemistry and biology.
Alternative therapies to pharmaceuticals include talk therapy with a clinical therapist, who may use tools such as EMDR as part of trauma recovery, says Dianne Dragon, a pastoral intern and peer counselor who has worked with many soldiers suffering from PTSD. According to Dragon, some people suffering the long-term effects of trauma report relief from symptoms can come from receiving deep tissue massage, reiki, or other healing arts.
A companion animal may provide comfort and support. One organization, Soldier’s Best Friend, matches shelter dogs with combat veterans who suffer PTSD, to be trained either as Certified Service Dogs or as Emotional Support Animals. These dogs can make symptoms like agoraphobia, hypervigilance, insomnia, and panic attacks less acute.
The best way to honor the memories of our fallen on Memorial Day is to rededicate ourselves to healing the wounded. Combat related PTSD will not change names in the new DSM-V, but healing modalities will continue to expand and be refined, particularly as the risks of pharmaceutical treatment become more clear. The war in the Middle East has stretched for more than a decade, and as after every war, we must find a place here at home for those who served. We owe it to our soldiers to ease their suffering, caused or exacerbated by combat. When the fighting is over, they deserve to lay down their arms and rest.
—Photo credit: AN HONORABLE GERMAN/Flickr
About Justin Cascio
This is a terrific overview of the current change in psychiatric label of Disorder to Injury. It is very unfortunate that the DSM-5 group did not do the Right Action for our Injured Warriors. The Behavioral “Health” System does not offer holistic and integrative health approaches as you discussed Reiki, massage, acupuncture, therapeutic arts & outings, equine & dog therapies, spouse support groups, trauma therapy support groups, individual theray and finding meaningful work and continuing education. Healing, restoration and resilience for this Injury that effects all of the body-mind-spirit-emotions and social systems (family & friends) are deeply experienced and require ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ health practices to foster release and relief of the pain and suffering of our Warriors and their Families. Please visit our website and sign our Petition to Change this Hamful Label — Disorder represents Life Long Illness with “no end in sight.” NOT!!! http://jerryvestinjuredwarrior.com .
PTSD treatment for Veterans found ineffective.
Eli Lilly made $65 billion on the Zyprexa franchise.Lilly was fined $1.4 billion for Zyprexa fraud!
The atypical antipsychotics (Zyprexa,Risperdal,Seroquel) are like a ‘synthetic’ Thorazine,only they cost ten times more than the old fashioned typical antipsychotics.
These newer generation drugs still pack their list of side effects like diabetes for the user.All these drugs work as so called ‘major tranquilizers’.This can be a contradiction with PTSD suffers as we are hyper vigilant and feel uncomfortable with a drug that puts you to sleep and makes you sluggish.
That’s why drugs like Zyprexa don’t work for PTSD survivors like myself.
-Daniel Haszard FMI Google-Haszard Zyprexa
With the usual giant “I am not a health professional of any sort; I have an English degree” disclaimer, I don’t think any kind of drug is the answer to PTSD. My friends and I who have all struggled with the symptoms of complex PTSD (the kind that you get through chronic exposure to trauma, like on the battlefield or in an abusive home) have tried pharmaceuticals, and know their limitations. What the brain does to protect you from trauma on the battlefield isn’t so neatly undone as by popping a pill. It takes a lot of unlearning, and learning of new skills, that a talented trauma recovery professional can help you with.
Reiki? Massage? Healing Arts? What, I pray, might those be? Crystal healing? Psychic readings? Magic?
This post is incoherent. It starts off discussing attempts to reclassify PTSD as an injury, which would have the obvious implication of clearly putting it with every other war injury for which veterans are assured a lifetime disability compensation and medical treatments. Hell, who knows, maybe they could even be able to score a purple heart for it if the stars aligned. But it doesn’t even make that point clearly.
Then it veers off and starts claiming that the military has ties to Big Pharma (in spite of military memos which warned that medicine is being over-prescribed) and somehow ties this in with half of the DSM authors having ties to big pharma as well. And it goes on to talk about the huge profits that pharmaceuticals make. This contradicts the insinuation that the DSM authors failed to rename PTSD as an injury as some sort of a profit-seeking scheme, since, quite clearly, the most profitable solution which would secure the most taxpayer dollars for veterans’ treatments would be to call it an injury.
But yeah… this post seems to be of two minds. On the one hand there is a concern that veterans aren’t being treated well enough, but underneath that, this seems to be a rant against evidence-based medicine in favor of New Age pseudoscienctific placebos. It’s full of insinuation that medicine is overused and hasn’t been proven to be effective, but at the same time it’s pushing therapies that haven’t been put through clinical trials and offering anecdotes to suggest that they would work better.
FTR, I’m a USMC combat veteran.