After the War
One of the first topics of discussion in this course was the PTSD soldiers experienced after coming back from deployment. This is a sad topic to study, but widely known as something veterans deal with after voluntarily serving our country. I decided to look into the treatment of PTSD for veterans as my topic for the documentary review. After watching Frontline: The Wounded Platoon, I was appalled at how veterans were being treated once they came home. It wasn’t just the treatment at home that needed to be repaired, but the treatment abroad as well (Buchanan & Edge, 2010).
After watching this documentary, I felt a sense of discourse between the healthcare I believed soldiers and veterans were receiving and the healthcare that they are actually receiving. I was under the impression that soldiers abroad got the medical care they needed, whether it be from a physical injury during battle or with difficulty processing traumas that they had endured. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Many times, soldiers were given a few antidepressants and sleeping pills and sent back out. The way it was depicted in the documentary was that there weren’t enough soldiers fighting; they had to keep every single one that they had on the battlefield, no matter what the cost or emotional toll was. It was awful seeing what traumas the soldiers were going through while abroad, all for the safety and the freedom we have here (Buchanan & Edge, 2010). What I saw were practitioners and a healthcare system that cared more about the war than the individuals fighting it.
Not only were they not properly treated abroad, when they got back things didn’t get much better. Many of the veterans in this specific platoon were unable to receive military benefits due to the amount of time they spent enlisted. If they remained enlisted and working on base, they’d get benefits that often did not meet their mental illness needs; having to wait weeks to get an appointment or not being able to get their medications. Since they couldn’t get the help they needed, they started to self medicate. For many men from the Platoon that were still active duty military, the self medication spiraled into addictions they couldn’t get out of. They’d end up being dishonorably discharged for continuously failing drug tests, not showing up for work, or being under the influence at work (Buchanan & Edge, 2010). Now, this would be understandable if the men had been given treatments for their addiction, or treatments for the PTSD that ultimately caused the incidence of addiction, or even offered any sort of mental health treatment. But the fact that these men weren’t given any sort of accessible treatment at all over the course of their service, after asking for it while abroad and at home, is disgraceful. They served their country because they wanted to, and they ended up with two disorders that they now cannot properly heal from due to the ignorance and oblivion by their system and providers.
If men on the Platoon were granted veteran’s benefits after serving, they had better odds of being able to dodge the addiction that came with untreated PTSD in their dis-benefited counterparts. The VA does not employ nearly enough mental health professionals to aid in the combat of mental illness’ post-war (Brancu, et al., 2014). Part of this is a broader mental health practitioner deficit, but the VA should be creating incentives to educate and employ those who wish to become mental health professionals.
This mental health practitioner and professional deficit is detrimental for the country, but more importantly struggling veterans. They want help, but when they go to seek it through their benefits received by the government, it is inaccessible. This is a giant issue, and I hope to one day be able to help fix it by becoming a practitioner. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that these men and women aren’t able to get the help they need after they have sacrificed so much for our country. The military healthcare system needs a major overhaul if it wants to take care of it’s members like those members are taking care of our freedom.
References
Brancu, M., Thompson, N. L., Beckham, J. C., Green, K. T., Calhoun, P. S., Elbogen, E. B., . . . Wagner, H. R. (2014). The impact of social support on psychological distress for U.S. Afghanistan/Iraq era veterans with PTSD and other psychiatric diagnoses. Psychiatry Research,217(1-2), 86-92.
Buchanan, C. (Producer), & Edge, D. (Director). (2010, May 18). The Wounded Platoon [Television series episode]. In Frontline. Arlington, VA: PBS. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-the-wounded-platoon/