Troops still may be misdiagnosed with personality disorder

[kpete]

Source: Dallas News

Troops still may be misdiagnosed with personality disorder

07:48 AM CDT on Monday, August 16, 2010

Anne Flaherty, The Associated Press

..............................

Luther said that he was confined for a month in a 6-by-8 foot room without treatment. At one point, Luther acknowledges, he snapped – biting a guard and spitting in the face of a military chaplain.

After that episode, Luther said, the Army told him he could return home and keep his benefits if he signed papers admitting he had a personality disorder. If he didn't sign, he said, he was told he would be kicked out eventually anyway.

Luther signed the papers.

His case highlights the irony in many personality discharges. A person is screened mentally and physically before joining the military. But upon returning from combat, that same person is told he or she had a serious mental disorder that predated military service.



Read more: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nationworld/stories/DN-discharge_16nat.ART.State.Edition1.47acb68.html

[RandomThoughts]

1. Many times their is a depression with realizing the system is flawed.

Young men and women go into the army with ideas of doing good to help, and when they see the injustice in some things, they lose confidence in what they were fighting for, and they can even feel bad about their actions, as they have new thoughts on what is reality.

If they begin to realize the system needs fixing, some call that a mental disorder, and the process of finding that clarity gets attacked by many things like depression, it is making it through a storm.


If you think things are messed up, some want you to take a pill, and just get over it.

Many find new strength in the lessons of their lives, although lack of justice in society makes it harder to find the better parts, and they have to be found in other places until society becomes more just.


Many depressed soldiers are trying to find the way through the knowledge that the system is wrong, and told that the system is correct. Some get taken under in the storm, by turning to violence, some self destruction. Some make it through and fight for what they think is better, not what they are told to think is better.

But then they have to know they were correct both with older and newer thoughts, since in both cases they did what they thought was best.

Much of the mental problems of war, are people learning what war really is, and that changing a view point.

If you did what you think is wrong now, that does not mean when you did it it was wrong, because you did what was best with what you knew then. You can be completely correct at two different times doing opposite things, based on what you knew at the time you did something.

[pnwmom]

4. A personality disorder is believed to begin in very early childhood, not like depression.

[groovedaddy]

2. This is what happens to cannon fodder. I think it was ny times that ran an article a few months

ago about the results of head trauma among the military, in particular, the often missed impact of nearby explosions on the brain. Often, there are no visible signs of trauma but the effects are still there.
It sounds like Luther is getting some justice and help. It's a very poor way to treat veterans.

[UTUSN]

3. K&R #1 for, It's more like criminal malpractice, not misdiagnosis n/t