More on TBI and the military...

• The Army News Service reports that -- as announced a few weeks ago -- "The Army launched its Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and mild Traumatic Brain Injury chain-teaching program at the Pentagon last week." The program:

...is mandatory for all active-duty and reserve-component Soldiers, from the highest to lowest levels in the chain of command.
...
Lt. Gen. James L. Campbell, director of the Army Staff, opened the training by telling his peers that the biggest teaching point he wanted to get out to the Army's leaders involved a cultural shift in thought - that leaders shouldn't assume that because Soldiers have no visible injuries that all is well mentally.

• Good news no matter how you look at it, or from what portion of the political spectrum.

• And on the not-yet-dealt-with front, we have a report from NPR's KUOW (Seattle) of the experience of a local soldier, Staff Sgt. Richard Kellar, with the hell of TBI:

KELLAR: "Depression, anxiety and all the rest of that stuff. It's bad. They give you Zoloft and they try to monitor it. And all the rest of that."

REPORTER: "Does it help?"

KELLAR: "I don't know. I don't see a difference. I'm still depressed."

It's going to take years -- decades -- for the full impact of returning Iraq veterans' TBIs to be handled (well or at all) by US society, as Kellar's experience (and others like it) is already showing. But it's encouraging to see even the limited progress represented by the Army's joint PTSD/TBI educational program.

Labels: Army, Iraq War, PTSD, TBI, traumatic brain injury, US military