Missing the Point on Hasan and "Mental Health"
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Missing the Point on Hasan and "Mental Health"
Date: Nov 14, 2009 9:07 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
===============================
Where is, anywhere, this false
dogma of ME!! at the center of
the universe and the universe of
"Perversion is NORMAL," successful?
http://www.actionlyme.org/BRAINDAMAGE.htm
http://www.actionlyme.org
COWARD ^^ Hasan did what he did because
he was or was trained to be a *coward.*
Envy is the source of all cowardice
and the fear of being "less-than" someone
else is at the center of envy as well as
is at the center of every false belief
system, such as psychiatry.
If every false belief system has some
self-flattering purpose to the false
believer, is the cowardice of the need
for self-flattery (or "insecurity")
something to be absolved, while the
victims are blamed... on the couch?
Jesus said, "Blessed are the Victims
(poor in spirit). Psychiatry calls
this the "MENTAL ILLNESS" of "DEPRESSION."
See?
The Victim is the Diseased One,
according to psychiatry, while the
perpetrator is just doing what is
"normal" is or performing a "defense
mechanism."
This psychiatric crap total brainscramble,
yet this country can't face it because of
our of *envy* and *greed,* and because
we're *SPECIAL,* we're killing Arabs
for their oil. And we're killing anyone else
who gets in the way, "even countries who
HARBOR 'terrorists'"-- Henry Kissinger
(like Afghanistan, which is for Pipelines
and not people).
No no-dicks - the cowardly, vain and
just plain STUPID psychiatrists - are
gonna tell everyone how to cure their
own no-dick, Cowardice-Is-Normal disease?
Don't happen cuz it can't.
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
================================
http://www.counterpunch.org/cramer11132009.html
The Militarization of Mental Health
Death By Denial
By MARY LYNN CRAMER
“While investigators probe for a motive behind the mass shooting
at the Fort Hood military base in Texas Thursday, in which an army
psychiatrist is suspected of killing 13 people, military personnel at
the base are in shock as the incident ‘brings the war home’…
Tragically, Fort Hood has also born much of the brunt from its heavy
involvement in both occupations. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for
more suicides than any other Army post since the U.S. invasion of Iraq
in 2003. In this year alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides
each month - at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year
alone.”
Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, 11/6/09
“The parents of US Army Reserve Specialist Chancellor Keesling, an
Iraq war veteran, received a letter yesterday from the VA asking that
their son complete his ‘Post Deployment Adjustment.’ The only problem
is, Chance Keesling had killed himself in Iraq nearly five months
ago….” The father of Chancellor Keesling stated “I don’t think as a
country we understand mental health…as we go through the longest war
in our history since Viet Nam, and multiple deployments, using
civilian soldiers like reservists and the Guard in ways we have never
used them in this country before…we have to be very conscious that
mental health issues are going to impact these soldiers.”
DemocracyNow.org 11/11/09
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist accused of shooting to
death 13 people and wounding 30 others on November 5, 2009, was
responsible for treating a heavy caseload of PTSD patients whose
severely disabling trauma symptoms result from horrendous combat
experiences in the ongoing bloody and violent occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq. The Major is opposed to US military invasions of
those two countries. He is also a practicing Muslim, who also feels it
is wrong for Muslims to kill Muslims.
This much we all now know.
At a time when the military as a whole is concerned about the climbing
rate of suicides among soldiers---NPR reports that rate is at a thirty
year high (2/17/09)---managing the mental health needs of the 70,000
troops, relatives and support staff living at Fort Hood (the world’s
largest military base) must require unimaginable skill and knowledge.
I was thinking this, when I heard a radio broadcast of a “mental
health professional” from Fort Hood saying that any trauma Maj. Hasan
suffered could not have been anywhere near that experienced by the
soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan (and they didn’t come
back and commit mass murder). Other such comments from Texas
psychiatrists were widely published within a few hours or days of the
tragic shootings (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas, 11/08/09)
Research has shown that those who experience “secondary trauma” as
witnesses to another’s horrible suffering, often have worse symptoms
and poorer treatment outcomes than the trauma victims who receive
treatment. Why? Because the person involved in the traumatic incident
has the “advantage” of a real situation to examine, an actual
experience to come to terms with. They can express and feel guilt or
anger regarding their actual behavior; make amends, or place the blame
where it belongs…and thereby connect, recover and manage feelings.
A relatively powerless witness to the torment of another, has none of
those “tangible” circumstances to work through and resolve. The very
helplessness of witnesses who can do nothing to impact the horror of
the situation heard about or witnessed, leaves them outside the process
—unable to participate personally in the problem-solving, reframing,
grieving, and forgiving of personal behaviors and actual experiences.
Yet their feelings may be intense and more consciously experienced
while listening to the details of the murders of innocent children,
rapes, violations of human dignity, destruction of homes, villages,
dehumanization, and torture of the young and old citizens of the
occupied country (often committed in dissociated or altered states of
mind.) Those of us who have listened to Iraq veterans struggle through
recounting their military experiences, or to the testimony of the
“Winter Soldiers” of both Iraq and Viet Nam, know how difficult it is
to listen to these confessions just once on video. Imagine listening
“live”, repeatedly, everyday.
Denial of the need for therapeutic help is often stronger in the
person who witnessed, but was not the actual victim of a traumatic
event. Hence, what appear to be sudden, unanticipated eruptions of
repressed and dissociated emotions. Acting out dissociated feelings is
a possible complication of post-traumatic syndrome disorder, but not
always a necessary consequence of PTSD. (For more in depth discussion
and research on this, see works by Judith Lewis Herman, M. D. of the
“VOV Treatment Outcome Research Project,” and Joyanna L. Silberg,
Ph.D. “Dissociative Features Profile”) Research studies by Dr. Judith
Herman (2003) concluded that it takes more than trauma to cause the
kind of radical dissociative behaviors we used to describe as
“Multiple Personality Disorder,” and later “Dissociative Identity
Disorder.” Successful “attachment” relationships provide one with the
ability to regulate triggered emotions and maintain an awareness of
“self”--acting in accordance with a strongly established identity. If
one is suffering from PTSD and also from an Attachment Disorder,
situations that recall the traumatic events and trigger emotions
associated with those events, can also provoke dissociative
experiences. There is also a wide range of dissociative symptoms from
being unaware or unconscious of your behavior, to experiencing
yourself as other than “self” while acting in unfamiliar ways.
Most attachment studies focus on early childhood. However, it might be
useful to understand how later experiences in life—and throughout
one’s life---that are deeply challenging, undermining, and demeaning
of one’s identity and sense of self can lead to feelings of
disconnection, loss of relationships, social isolation; and
personality destabilization, confusion and vulnerability; as well as
erosion of affect management skills. Added to this for consideration
should be the life-long impact of repressed nightmarish memories
inherited from victimized relatives and their surviving communities.
However, it is not my intent to present here a professional
examination of the field of PTSD and Dissociation. Simply to raise the
issue that “secondary PTSD” is a reality that must be addressed and
adequately treated as much as other trauma symptoms.
Like many of the tens of thousands of soldiers at Fort Hood, Maj.
Hasan joined the military in order to get an education he could not
otherwise afford. Also similar to some of those who enlisted, Maj.
Hasan is against the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike most
other soldiers who have spoken out against the war, Major Hasan’s
opposition may be influenced by the fact that his Palestinian parents
come from a country that has endured brutal occupation, racism, and
all the worst forms of humiliation, exploitation, and torture for over
60 years.
In 1997, Malik Nadel Hasan enrolled in a tuition-free medical school
program at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in
Bethesda, Md. He graduated in 2003. More than five years ago, Major
Hasan confided to his family his disappointment with the Army and
complained of Anti-Muslim harassment. The report that he began to look
for a means of terminating his military commitment, sought legal
advice, and offered to pay back the cost of his graduate education.
Maj. Hasan’s military obligation would not be over until 2010. In the
meantime, with his much needed mental health and language skills in
scarce supply, military discharge seemed unlikely.
Relatives say that humiliating harassment the Major experienced
consisted of insults like “someone had put a diaper in his car,
saying, ‘That’s your headdress.’ In another case… someone had drawn a
camel on his car and written under it, ‘Camel jockey, get out!’”
Another such incident involved “ a soldier who had served in Iraq…
angered by a bumper sticker on Maj. Hasan’s car proclaiming ‘Allah is
Love’…ran his key the length of Major Hasan’s car. The loss of his
parents in 1998 and 2001 seemed to have been very difficult for the
Major. Acquaintances say he turned for solace to Islam (although his
Muslim parents were described as “not observant”), and withdrew
socially, and isolated himself, “delving into books on Islam.” (NYT
11/8/09)
None of this excuses the murders Maj. Hasan is reported to have
committed. Nor will the search for an al-Qaida connection provide
anything close to an adequate explanation of his possibly suicidal and
certainly homicidal behavior, nor the behavior of other military
officers and soldiers who committed similar crimes before him. Among
the latter, remember the killing of two mental health workers and
three soldiers (patients) by an Army Sergeant at Camp Liberty’s combat
stress center in Baghdad on May 11, 2009. The 44-year-old Sergeant was
on his 3rd Iraq deployment.
Reporting on that incident, The Psychiatric Times (July 2009) stated
that, since the invasion of Iraq (“Operation Iraq Freedom”), there had
been six previous incidents where service members killed their fellow
soldiers. Also cited was “A large-scale, nongovernmental assessment of
the psychological and cognitive needs of military service members
conducted by RAND Corporation [that] found that nearly 20% of military
service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan—300,000 in
all—reported symptoms of PTSD or major depression. Nevertheless, only
slightly more than half have sought treatment.” A year earlier, a
Mental Health Advisory Teams reported on the “issue of adequacy of
behavioral health staffing for the troops.” At that time there was one
mental health worker for every 1426 soldier or Marine. Maj. Hasan’s
caseload had been constantly increasing.
An Uncle living in Palestine recounted that along with “ethnic taunts”
his nephew said he endured, his work was also extremely stressful: “(H)
e was haunted by the wartime disabilities of soldiers he treated as an
Army psychiatrist…and was overwhelmed by a growing caseload he felt
unable to manage…He didn't have time even to breathe…Too much
pressure, too many patients, not enough staff ..He would say, 'I don't
know how to treat them or what to tell them,' because he didn't have
enough time. They just kept coming one after the other. Sometimes he
cried because of what happened to them. How young they are, what's
going to happen to the rest of their lives. They're going to be
handicapped; they're going to be crazy. He was very, very
sensitive.” (LA Times 11/8/09). Others have related how he chose the
field of mental health, instead of surgery, after fainting while
observing surgery on a child; and fainting again, at the sight of
blood, while delivering a baby.
In another interview the uncle stated: “I saw him with tears in his
eyes when he was talking about some of patients, when they came
overseas from the battlefield…One has no face, one he have no legs.
Hasan struggled to appear calm and unaffected to his patients…He
didn’t have enough time to spend with all the patients. ... I think he
couldn’t handle it as he wanted to." (Boston Herald/AP 11/7/09)
As a psychotherapist who worked with adult and child trauma patients
for many years, I can appreciate a little what it means to be part of
an understaffed, overworked trauma unit, under the best of
circumstances. Yet, I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to
endure the same pressures in the world’s largest military base.
We do not need excuses, or scapegoats, in order to intelligently
confront the reality of what transpired at Ft Hood, and to prevent
repeats of this awful incident. We do need to understand the
circumstances that can drive a military mental health worker to a
homicidal breaking point, just as we need to recognize the
circumstances that cause more and more soldiers at Fort Hood and else
where to commit suicide everyday.
There are no doubt other important aspects of this particular tragedy
and the larger problematic picture it illuminates that need to be
considered and investigated. No one knows as well as Maj. Hasan
himself what lead him to shoot and kill his fellow soldiers. As Jayne
Lyn Stahl points out in her article for Counterpunch (11/6/09) we do
not know the circumstances of Maj. Hasan’s deployment. Was his
background as a Muslim and a Mental Health Worker going to be
exploited in work with US interrogators as has happened with other
mental health workers? All we really know, as she points out, is that
he was being deployed and he definitely did not want to go. Stahl
cites the case of Alyysa Peterson, an Arabic speaking psychology major
and Army career intelligence officer, forced to participate in “a
clandestine operation” using so-called ‘alternative enhanced
interrogation techniques.” Actually, she refused to cooperate, and
became “deeply despondent about what she witnessed at the detention
camp in Iraq. On September 15, 2003, she was found with a bullet wound
to her head, a victim of what the Army euphemistically called ‘non-
hostile weapon discharge.’”
The point is, there is so much more than what is being reported daily
in the mass media that we do not know about.
I admit to feeling a moment of hope that possible “Secondary PTSD” and
“Dissociation” might be considered seriously when I saw a report (AP
11/10/09) that “A lawyer for the Army psychiatrist accused in a deadly
shooting spree at Fort Hood said Monday he asked investigators not to
question his client and expressed doubt that the suspect would be able
to get a fair trial, given the widespread attention to the case.” Will
the lawyer see his client before the FBI has questioned him? Will the
real facts come out, truth and justice prevail, intelligence and
compassion be applied to the process of examination and analysis of
what happened and how to prevent its repetition? Or will another evil
Imam with al-Qaida connections grab media attention, and justify an
even greater investment in the War on Terror at home and abroad? Stay
tuned, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the blindfolded Lady
with sword and scales.
Mary Lynn Cramer, MA, MSW, LICSW worked for many years as a clinical
social worker treating children and adults with PTSD and Dissociative
symptoms. She can be reached at mll...@yahoo.com
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