Just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being fought using reserves, a group of civilian reserves have banded together to deal with the psychological problems that many soldiers are bringing home with them after multiple deployments.
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More than a dozen counselors and psychologists have formed a unit they call Support Troops, and they offer their services free of charge to combat mental health issues on the home front.
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Many of the veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan need psychological help, according to Bill Cross, a therapist with offices in Manlius and Syracuse. In spite of stepped-up efforts by the Veterans Administration (VA) and military health services, some vets will still not be reached. Cross remembers what it's like to be a vet with nowhere to turn. He graduated from West Point and served 10 years in the Army; he later returned to the U.S. Military Academy to teach leadership and served a year in Vietnam. For the past 10 years he has taught classes in stress reduction through the Zen Center of Syracuse.
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"The idea is not to indicate that the VA isn't doing their job or anything like that," Cross said.
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"Our focus is to provide a service that either isn't being provided or the people don't want to access it through the VA."
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According to Steve Butler, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Central New York, there are already 700,000 veterans of both fronts in the current war, and approximately 7,000 have returned to upstate New York. In addition, noted Butler, "There is a tremendous number of what we call 'second order' effects on mental health. Someone who has been out of the service for years can experience mental health problems as a result of the trauma."
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Cross and the rest of the Support Troops network are seeing veterans, active military personnel and family members. "In some cases," said Cross, "the vet isn't willing to get help, so the family is the one that needs to reach out. It's sort of like the Alcoholics Anonymous model. We want to do support and therapy, but we also want to do public education. We want to be going around talking to service groups, churches, places like that to speak about what kinds of disorders are out there and what resources are available.
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"The facilities available have been insufficient until recently," he continued. "The VA has hired some more people and has put in a Vets Center in Binghamton, and another in Watertown, near Fort Drum. The Vets Center has a lot less red tape than the VA itself, and from what we hear, they do a lot of good work. There are some people, though, who just don't like to deal with the VA."
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Among the counselors willing to help is Yvette Jenkins, a member of the Army Reserve and an associate professor of counseling at Onondaga Community College. Jenkins also serves as co-chair of OCC's counseling department. She said that among the issues student veterans and reservists deal with are the "stresses that come along with re-entry into the natural way of day-to-day work, and the dreaded fear of being called back to active duty. You just settle into life as a student, and all of a sudden you can get yanked back out. Unfortunately, this has been a trend in this protracted war we have been in."
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There are lots of reasons, said Cross, why veterans don't get the help they need. "When they are getting out, they are asked if they have any post-traumatic stress disorder {PTSD} symptoms," he noted. "If they say yes, they have to stay on a few days, which many don't want to do, so they just say no. Some of them feel as if their buddies will look down on them if they ask for help. There's that macho thing‹that stigma. What we try to do is to educate them that PTSD is a normal response to an abnormal situation. We tell them that they are normal."
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The method employed by the Support Troops team is based on a talk therapy technique known as prolonged exposure therapy. Developed by Dr. Edna Foa, an Israeli-born clinical psychologist who now directs the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety at the University of Pennsylvania, this therapy claims an 80 percent success rate for treatment of chronic PTSD.
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Cross himself has seen a dozen veterans in the past year. They find him through informal connections, but with the number of returnees rising, he felt the need to broaden the outreach. He has counseled people with all manner of divergent views on the war. "I see people who are very gung ho about having been there. People who support the war, or are at least saying it was their job and they were proud to do it. They see us as people who have some appreciation of what they've been through."
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The Army released figures last November that indicated that more than 11 percent of troops returning from Iraq are exhibiting symptoms of mental health problems, mostly PTSD and depression. According to a study published in the November Journal of the American Medical Association, in initial screenings, 4.4 percent of returnees indicated a need for psychological help, while six months later, 11.7 percent were symptomatic.
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When asked if the anti-war movement contributes to the stress felt by veterans, Cross thought for a moment. "It isn't so much that the peace movement contributes to their stress. I don't hear much about the peace movement destroying morale or things like that. It's that people who haven't been there don't understand what's going on there. They come back and it's business as usual, and that is upsetting. They see the daily course of life in the United States not being interrupted by what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. That drives them crazy."
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To learn more about the Support Troops project, or to set up an appointment, call 200-0531.
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