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as a weekly practice I listen to npr and do a little sketch on one of the stories. take a look, you can click on the illustration to make it bigger!

Friday, May 23, 2008

advice to stop PTSD diagnoses triggers probe.



More and more military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are seeking help and compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder. That has created concern by veterans and others that the government could try to minimize the problem of PTSD to save money. An incident at a veterans' hospital near Fort Hood, the Army post in Texas that is one of the nation's largest military bases, has stoked that concern.

In an e-mail, a psychologist at the Olin E. Teague Veterans' Center in Temple, Texas, advised her staff to stop diagnosing veterans with PTSD to save money. The e-mail became public last week. The head of the Department of Veterans Affairs insists that's not VA policy.

The VA has refused interview requests about the incident. In a statement, Secretary James Peake characterized the e-mail as an isolated example: "A single staff member, out of VA's 230,000 employees, in a single medical facility, sent a single e-mail with suggestions that are inappropriate and have been repudiated at the highest level of our health care organization." The VA's inspector general's office is headed to Temple to find out if anyone higher up is telling the VA to "cool it."

-excerpt from NPR

4 comments:

Cindy said...

this is a very sad situation. i don't know what people are thinking when they play with people's lives like this.

i heard a statistic that the VA estimates there are 200,000 homeless veterans on any given night.

Alessandra Olanow said...

i agree - very sad indeed.

viagra online said...

It's a great advice... I agree with the main point above, actually we need more time to read each entry and you must know it, but I will do my best try. Seriously. By th way, Teague Veterans' Center in Temple is the best center in Texas, most of the scientist were students in 1979.

viagra online said...

PTSD is real menace for every army in this world.. we most eradicate war in order to stop it!