Shrinkwrap Your War
Via Shrinkwrapped, The Soldier’s Project is a private network of psychiatrists and psychologists offering free counseling to war vets and their families outside the military and VA systems.
Don’t hold it against them, but they appear to have DoD’s blessing:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — The U.S. Department of Defense’s American Forces Information Service issued the following press release:
By Samantha L. Quigley American Forces Press Service
The stress of deployments, especially during war time, can take a toll on servicemembers and their families. A group of licensed mental health professionals in Southern California is helping to minimize that impact.
“‘The Soldiers Project‘ offers free, no-red-tape psychological counseling to any servicemember who has served in Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom,” said Barbara Schochet, assistant director for the organization.
Currently the project serves Los Angeles and Orange Counties, but plans are to eventually expand its service area.
Despite the group’s name, servicemembers from all branches of the military who have served in operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom are eligible to take advantage of the project’s service. Servicemembers’ family members and loved ones also are eligible for free counseling prior to and during deployment and after homecoming, Schochet said.
“We want to support the families while their loved one is away, and we want to help with reintegration and combat stress issues when they return,” she said.
To maximize the effects of the services, all sessions are free and there is no limit to the number of sessions offered.
The counselors offering their time include psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and marriage and family therapists. They are required to attend training sessions to learn about post-traumatic stress disorder and what families endure when their servicemembers are gone.
The organization also has a group of speakers who can talk about the project and how to identify problems in patients, clients, schools, congregations or service groups, Schochet said.
The Soldiers Project is a new supporter of America Supports You, a Defense Department program connecting citizens and corporations with military personnel and their families serving at home and abroad.
Here’s a Dec 17 Army Times op-ed:
Alison Lighthall
It has become abundantly clear this year that our military medical system is not equipped to provide all the physical and psychological care that returning veterans need.
We don’t even have an accurate idea of how large the burden might end up being because as time goes on, we continue to uncover more problems, such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. Many Veterans Affairs facilities are already overwhelmed.
Our country needs an all-hands approach to this crisis. We need to call upon the nation to step up and help combat veterans and their families in tangible, useful ways. And we, as military personnel, need to respond to their generous offers by accepting their help.
I know it’s hard for warriors to accept help from anyone, much less a civilian or civilian organization that has little understanding of our world. But for this nation to remain strong we’re going to have to do everything in our power to recover from wounds both visible and invisible.
To that end, we need to accept the help that’s offered; we can’t afford the luxury of being picky about whether the help is from a civilian entity or the military.
Because we no longer have a draft, America is two generations away from the experience of mandatory service. It’s no longer true that everyone has an uncle, brother, son, father, boyfriend, cousin or next-door neighbor in the military. Ignorance of the military is rampant. For most Americans, that pesky Iraq conflict is relegated to a blip on the news. It is not in their faces the way the Vietnam War was. More specifically, it is not in their hearts.
Like so much of America, many civilian health care professionals are astonishingly disconnected from the impact the war is having on our combat vets, and have little or no knowledge about the military world. The bridge between the combat veteran and the civilian medical provider, which may have been there in previous generations, is now in serious disrepair.
Two things have to happen for that bridge to be rebuilt.
First, civilians need to come closer to our world. They need to read stories written by veterans who have been there, watch documentaries about the war, become at least a little familiar with our alphabet soup language (example: To civilians, a fob is something you put your car key on. To some in the military a FOB is a forward-operating base.) They have to come out of their protected bubble and develop a thicker skin so that they can learn about the realities of combat today.
Civilians need to learn more about the heart and soul of a warrior and what it means when we say we are mission-driven. They need to stop asking, “What was the hardest part about being over there?” and start asking “What’s the hardest part about being home?”
And someone needs to declare it a sin to ask a combat veteran, “So, did you kill anyone?”
Americans need to start reading the personal accounts being published in articles and books. They could start by hopping online to http://www.battlemind.org and going through that online training. They need to start thinking about the reality of a seriously wounded vet and the impact those wounds have on each person in that veteran’s life.
But most of all, they need to find ways to reach out within their own communities to embrace their own returning soldiers and welcome them back into the fold in whatever shape they come home in.
The second thing that must happen will have to come from the military side. Military personnel must be willing to meet those civilians halfway. We have to be willing to accept their help - even if they don’t “get it” - and teach them about our experiences.
There are a lot of excellent civilian organizations serving returning military service members in a variety of ways. Some are already operational, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association, organized and run by Paul Rieckhoff, former Marine and Iraq war veteran, and Vet4Vets, a national group created by Jim Driscoll, a former Marine who served in Vietnam. Because former military people started these groups and run them, there is both a long-term commitment toward service members and an inside understanding about the military world.
A new cooperative treatment program from Brooke Army Medical Center and the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center is beginning, as Army Times reported ["Private sector pitches in," Fast Track, Oct. 29]. It is a precedent I hope many will follow. There’s also The Soldiers Project, A Million Thanks, Homes for Our Troops and others.
These are just a sample of the efforts being made to help soldiers. Far from the behavior we saw from civilians during the Vietnam War, today’s Americans are trying to do the right thing.
Some of the groups were started by health care professionals who know little about serving this population, but are willing to learn. And God bless them, because we’re going to need them in the years to come.
Since leaving the Army in April, I have been speaking to civilian groups around the country about the psychosocial impact of war on our returning service members. Civilians are eager to learn how to support military families and how to help vets feel welcome and help them adjust.
I have also been meeting with people at the command level inside the military, discussing the need to open up to civilians some of the jobs usually held by military personnel, such as mental health work. And that’s beginning to happen.
We need to take a chance on those who are genuinely willing to learn and help, let them into our world, accept their offerings of support, and then be truly grateful that our country, while flawed in many ways, still declares in a clear, unified voice, “I will never leave a fallen comrade.”
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:41 am on Monday, December 31, 2007
3 Responses to “Shrinkwrap Your War”
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December 31st, 2007 at 12:35 pm
What an excellent idea. Maybe this is a first step toward educating the public that combat soldiers who come home are not crazed killers unable to resume a normal life (the myth that tainted Vietnam veterans all their adult lives).
December 31st, 2007 at 5:09 pm
This sounds like a good idea, but I find myself hesitating to applaud. One may hope that psychiatry has advanced since my own experience with shrinks after Viet Nam. For me, it was “Sailor, heal thyself.” Which I did.
December 31st, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Went to a shrink when I was in the Corps. Was at a school that was redoing the Plan Of Instruction and it was an automatic flunk if you followed it, yet we were required to follow it. I walked into the shrinks office and told him that I spent my days walking down the halls wanting to punch someone. He looked at me and said that he thought that you had to be crazy to join the Corps. I left the Pendleton hospital and went back to the Stumps. I never saw a shrink after that. That was 1976