A 6-year-old Portuguese water dog named Moxie has shed light on the furrier side of medicine – providing a dog’s-eye view of her job as a therapy dog as she cuddled with patients and staff.
The largest study to date of recent military and veteran suicides has identified two high-risk groups of former troops who are generally ineligible for the psychiatric care afforded to all others who served: those forced out of the military for misconduct and those who enlisted but were quickly discharged for other problems.
A Plum woman shot herself in the head Monday afternoon in the parking lot of the H.J. Heinz campus of the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System in Aspinwall.
My husband is always irritable. He gets upset at the smallest things and takes it out on whoever is around. He’s always had a bit of a temper but it got worse after his fourth deployment. What could be causing this?
Jason Richburg has suffered for years with fears of confined spaces, large crowds, loud noises and lots of commotion, which sets off massive panic attacks. He often secludes himself away from everyone because when he has these anxiety attacks he is not rational and has a very difficult time even talking or thinking.
Let’s say a 33-year-old woman is admitted to an emergency room after being in a car accident. The accident was violent and scary, but other than a mild concussion and some bruises and lacerations, she appears to be okay, physically. But once she’s been examined and bandaged, once her vital signs have been confirmed to sit in the normal ranges, another, trickier question pops up: Is she likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder?
Here’s where current medical science falters a little bit. Sure, once PTSD symptoms manifest themselves, researchers have some ideas about how to treat them — assuming the patient has access to solid care, of course. But those same researchers are a lot less far along in their quest to predict who is most likely to develop the disorder in the first place — a task made much more difficult by the lack of understanding about why some people bounce back psychologically from trauma so much more easily than others. If researchers had clearer diagnostic procedures for PTSD risk, it would help alleviate a lot of suffering by quickly directing resources to those most at risk, particularly in big populations like returning soldiers.
Twenty thousand soldiers who seek help each year at Army substance-abuse clinics encounter a program in such disarray that thousands who need treatment are turned away and more than two dozen others linked to poor care have spiraled into suicide, a USA TODAY investigation has found.
The fight that started Keith Davis on a path to a new life began when he was buying marijuana. It was early afternoon on Aug. 8. As he tells it, he was in at his usual hangout in North Central Philadelphia, in front of an abandoned church at 18th and Ridge. He was taking too long mulling over his purchase, and another man got impatient and told him to go buy his stuff somewhere else.
They come into our office at the VA hospital in Montrose, N.Y., hesitantly. Eyes filled with doubt, hands restless. They want us to help them file compensation claims for disabilities resulting from their military service. Some have debilitating physical injuries, but almost every one also displays mannerisms — fidgeting in their seats, knees bobbing up and down during interviews, avoiding eye contact — that indicate that they have PTSD. The symptoms jump out at me because I have lived with PTSD for more than 70 years.
David Morris said he was doomed from the moment the young infantryman he was riding with in an Army Humvee asked if he’d ever been blown up. He hadn’t — yet.