Democratic Underground - The article really is a must-read. Some other points that jumped out at me were

these:

Individual therapy with a trained clinician, a key element in recovery from PTSD, is infrequent, and targeted group therapy is offered only twice a week....The recognized treatment for PTSD is cognitive behavioral therapy, in which patients are encouraged to face their feared memories or situations and to change their negative perceptions. A key technique is known as prolonged exposure therapy. It involves revisiting a traumatic memory in order to process it. The idea is not to erase the memory but to prevent it from being disabling. Highly structured, one-on-one sessions over a limited time period have proved most effective, according to Edna B. Foa, a professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been contracted by the Department of Veterans Affairs to train 250 therapists who treat PTSD.

But Calloway and a dozen other soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan interviewed by The Post described a vague regimen at Walter Reed's outpatient psychiatric unit, Ward 53. They get a heavy dose of group sessions such as "Reflecting with Music," "Decisions," "Feelings Exploration" and "Art Expressions." Calloway reported to his "Reel Reflections" class one morning for a screening of "The Devil Wears Prada." Only two hours a week are devoted to a post-traumatic recovery group, according to a copy of their schedule.

These soldiers said they are over-medicated and treated with none of the urgency given the physically wounded. One desperate patient, a combat medic who broke down after her third tour in Iraq, said she begged her psychiatrist: "We are handicapped patients, too. Cut off both my legs, but give me my sanity. You can't get a prosthesis for that."

In an interview this month, Col. John C. Bradley, head of psychiatry at Walter Reed, said soldiers with combat-stress disorders receive the accepted psychotherapeutic treatment there. He said they are placed in a specially designed "trauma track" and are given at least an hour of individual therapy a week and a full range of classes to help them cope with their symptoms. Exposure therapy is as effective in group settings as in individual sessions, he maintained -- a belief that runs counter to the latest clinical research.

Fucking idiots--they just DON'T get it.

But here's the biggest crime of all:

One of the country's best PTSD programs is located at Walter Reed, but because of a bureaucratic divide it is not accessible to most patients. The Deployment Health Clinical Center, run by the Department of Defense and separate from the Army's services, offers a three-week program of customized treatment. Individual exposure therapy and fewer medications are favored. Deployment Health can see only about 65 patients a year but is the envy of many in the Army. "They need to clone that program," said Col. Charles W. Hoge, chief of psychiatry and behavior services at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

Sixty five patients a year--that's what comes out of the sandbox every two months!

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