The Army is overhauling mental health services after years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, aiming to end an era of experimentation in which nearly 200 programs were tried on different bases.
At Joint Base Lewis-McChord and elsewhere, the Army has pushed counseling teams out of hospitals to embed with troops. It’s also cutting back the use of private psychiatric hospitals while expanding intensive mental health programs at military facilities such as Madigan Army Medical Center.
Serious challenges
The reforms come at a time when the Army, despite a dramatic reduction in troops headed to a war zone, still faces serious challenges trying to reach and treat soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions.
At JBLM, diagnoses of PTSD over the past three years have been at the highest level since the peak of the Iraq War in 2008.
Armywide, patient contacts with mental health personnel reached 2 million last year, more than double the numbers six years earlier when a much larger Army was enmeshed in ground combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet, despite expanded outreach, the Army’s latest PTSD training document — provided to medical staff in December — shows that more than half the soldiers with PTSD and other mental health problems still don’t receive any care.
[For more of this story, written by Hal Bernton and Adam Ashton, go to http://kdhnews.com/military/as...c0-3319c7b0b6d1.html]
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