Tag: Veterans and psychiatry

This week on MIA Radio, we chat with Paula J. Caplan, clinical and research psychologist, author of books and plays, playwright, actor, director, and activist. Paula is also a passionate and steadfast advocate for service members, veterans and their families.

Group-based MBSR and PCGT therapies effective as a complementary treatment for PTSD.

Veterans struggling with a diagnosis of PTSD, or depression and other difficulties find that learning to perform Shakespearean monologues, and developing their own dramatic monologues, can help them "unwire" from the traumas of war.

I had been an excellent combat medic — I had deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan totaling over 28 months of combat in Infantry and Cavalry units. Yet, after over six years on these psychiatric drugs, I felt reduced to a helpless being who would require assistance for the simplest of menial tasks.

University of California Berkely's Greater Good Science Center reports a study that finds "adding mindfulness to traditional therapy could be beneficial for soldiers with PTSD." Article...

The meaning of veterans’ reactions to war is quite simple; they are trying to find a way to integrate the incredible horrors they’ve witnessed and to find a way to come back into a society that cannot possibly fully understand them. Drugging them into a stupor is not the answer. Congressman David Jolly (FL-13) has recently introduced the Veteran Suicide Prevention Act (H.R. 4640). The bill calls for the VA to study veteran suicides over the past five years and to determine what extent psychiatric drugs are implicated in those suicides. I encourage everyone to support Mr. Jolly’s bill by writing or calling your congressional representatives and encouraging them to cosponsor the bill.

I have long been concerned with the way society responds to people who come back from war. Veterans are routinely funneled into psychiatry’s grasp. Over the decades, some people who fought in wars have shared with me their experiences of being psychiatrized upon return from war. Sometimes these experiences included veterans being stripped of their second amendment rights, and a host of other constitutional, civil, and human rights violations as they began to be forced into complying with psychiatric regimens, and on several occasions this included veterans being subjected to electroshock.