Military Accused of Exerting Pressure Not To Diagnose PTSD

Conservatives are often claiming that efforts at making health care more affordable represent attempts at government control of health care. I suspect that this type of government meddling in health care decisions is not what Republicans are talking about. Salon alleges that the military is attempting to suppress diagnoses of PTSD based upon clandestine recordings:

Sgt. X had no idea that the little machine in his pocket was about to capture recorded evidence of something wounded soldiers and their advocates have long suspected — that the military does not want Iraq veterans to be diagnosed with PTSD, a condition that obligates the military to provide expensive, intensive long-term care, including the possibility of lifetime disability payments. And, as Salon will explore in a second article Thursday, after the Army became aware of the tape, the Senate Armed Services Committee declined to investigate its implications, despite prodding from a senator who is not on the committee. The Army then conducted its own internal investigation — and cleared itself of any wrongdoing…

Contacted recently by Salon, McNinch seemed surprised that reporters had obtained the tape, but answered questions about the statements captured by the recording. McNinch told Salon that the pressure to misdiagnose came from the former head of Fort Carson’s Department of Behavioral Health. That colonel, an Army psychiatrist, is now at Fort Lewis in Washington state. “This was pressure that the commander of my Department of Behavioral Health put on me at that time,” he said. Since McNinch is a civilian employed by the Army, the colonel could not order him to give a specific, lesser diagnosis to soldiers. Instead, McNinch said, the colonel would “refuse to concur with me, or argue with me, or berate me” when McNinch diagnosed soldiers with PTSD. “It is just very difficult being a civilian in a military setting.”

McNinch added that he also received pressure not to properly diagnose traumatic brain injury, Sgt. X’s other medical problem. “When I got there I was told I was overdiagnosing brain injuries and now everybody is finding out that, yes, there are brain injuries,” he recalled. McNinch said he argued, “‘What are we going to do about treatment?’ And they said, ‘Oh, we are just counting people. We don’t plan on treating them.'” McNinch replied, “‘You are bringing a generation of brain-damaged individuals back here. You have got to get a game plan together for this public health crisis.'”

1 Comment

  1. 1
    Eclectic Radical says:

    This, sadly, isn’t terribly new or surprising. In WWI, PTSD patients were shot for cowardice on a fairly regular basis. In WWII and Korea, the US army had a confirmed policy of assuming all shell-shock patients to be faking it to get out of combat duty. I am not entirely sure this policy has changed.

    There has always been an attitude among thick slice of the officer corps that PTSD patients are wimps who couldn’t hack it or outright criminals. It’s disappointing that the attitude has not changed more.

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