The Legislature has created a commission to look into the effects post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries have had on soldiers returning from the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
State and military officials are concerned veterans and their families fight two battles when they come home.
Soldiers are reluctant to admit problems, particularly psychological ones.
And if they do, they get tripped up in bureaucratic red tape.
New Hampshire Public Radio’s Dan Gorenstein reports the commission will begin to address those issues and more starting Wednesday.
Senator Joe Kenney says- at the very least- it’s disorienting to come home from a war zone.
A Marine Reservist, the Republican candidate for Governor served in Iraq from the fall of 2005, through February 2006.
TAPE: you come back and there is a lot of stress. There is the time zone....you are coming from a hostile environment to a friendly one, and so everything changes...even in that short period of time, it took me about 30 days to readjust.
Kenney is a co-sponsor of the legislation to create the commission.
He says when he got state-side more than two years ago, he was asked about whether he believed he suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
But the Senator says PTSD symptoms can be hard to detect.
And sometimes they won’t manifest for weeks after a veteran is home.
Kenney believes the military system simply isn’t equipped to handle the veteran’s of 21st century wars.
TAPE: what we have pretty much is a VA system that was put together under a peace time environment. As soon as we went to Afghanistan and Iraq that system was not there to take care of the PTSD soldiers.
According to a Rand Corporation study from this spring nearly 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans showed signs of PTSD or major depression.
The same study also found that about 19 percent reported a possible traumatic brain injury.
CEO of Riverbend Community Mental Health Center Louis Josephson expects those numbers to only grow.
He says, in a sense, PTSD and brain injuries are the unintended result of advances in military equipment.
TAPE: b/c we’ve done a better job of protecting our troops, fatalities are lower...but you are seeing people survive attacks, but they are coming out of them with more impairments...so people have higher needs.
Health and Human Services Nancy Rollins says New Hampshire veterans are in the unique situation.
Many of them are part-time.
TAPE: they literally go from being a community citizen to warrior, back to being citizen.
Rollins says that means National Guard troops and reservists often can have a harder time getting back to their old lives.
On top of that, she says soldiers who may need psychological help are reluctant to ask themselves.
Rollins says she hopes the commission can begin to identify solutions to the red tape, find new more healthcare providers and reduce the stigma attached to PTSD and brain injuries.
She knows it’s an ambitious agenda, but she sees it as her duty.
TAPE: it’s our obligation as a state to make sure our service members get whatever benefits they are entitled to, to be able to come back and resume their productive lives in NH.
For NHPR News, I’m DG.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
Google
Yahoo