(via Professor Kim.)
[O]n Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here.'
"Those people in Ward 54 were responsible for him. Their responsibility was to have a 24-hour watch on him," Negron said in a telephone interview from his home in Puerto Rico. While Soto-Ramirez's death was by his own hand, Negron and other soldiers say the hospital shares the blame.
In fact, repeated interviews over the course of one year with 14 soldiers who have been treated in Walter Reed's inpatient and outpatient psychiatric wards, and a review of medical records and Army documents, suggest that the Army's top hospital is failing to properly care for many soldiers traumatized by the Iraq war. As the Soto-Ramirez case suggests, inadequate suicide watch is one concern. But the problems run deeper. Psychiatric techniques employed at Walter Reed appear outmoded and ineffective compared with state-of-the-art care as described by civilian doctors. For example, Walter Reed favors group therapy over one-on-one counseling; and the group therapy is mostly administered by a rotating cast of medical students and residents, not full-fledged doctors or veterans. The troops also complain that the Army relies too much on pills; few of the soldiers took all the medication given to them by the hospital.
Perhaps most troubling, the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war has caused the soldiers' mental trauma in the first place. (There is an economic reason for doing so: Mental problems from combat stress can require the Army to pay disability for years.) Soto-Ramirez's medical records reveal the economical mindset of an Army doctor who evaluated him. "Adequate care and treatment may prevent a claim against the government for PTSD," wrote a psychologist in Puerto Rico before sending him to Walter Reed.
"The Army does not want to get into the mental-health game in a real way to really help people," said Col. Travis Beeson, who was flown to Walter Reed for psychiatric help during a second tour with one of the Army's special operations units in Iraq. "They want to Band-Aid it. They want you out of there as fast as possible, and they don't want to pay for it." Indeed, some psychiatric patients at Walter Reed are given the option of signing a form releasing them from the hospital as long as they give up any future disability payments from the Army. One soldier from Pennsylvania, who was shot five times in the chest and saved by body armor, told me he would do anything to get out of Walter Reed, even relinquish disability pay. "I'll sign anything as soon as I can get my hands on it," he told me several days before being released from the hospital. "I loved the Army. I was obsessed with it. The Army was my life. Fuck them now."
(Whole thing.)
Oh, in case you're wondering why this post got tagged with the race and racism category, Mr. Soto-Ramirez was Puerto Rican. Latinos and African Americans are heavily over represented in our armed forces, especially in combat units:
Brain Gifford, a researcher with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the University of California at Berkeley, told AP reporters, “"That this may be related to Latinos' participation in the Marine Corps, which would increase their exposure to high-intensity combat situations, or perhaps it is due to Hispanics' overrepresentation in the lower ranks.”
Last year, the Inter Press Service printed an article stating that Hispanic soldiers fighting in Iraq were dying at higher rates, and were being lured into dangerous positions when recruited by the Armed Forces.
As American causalities in Iraq steadily increase, so does the apprehension in many of the nation’s Latino communities. The concern is that their children are dying at incredibly high numbers and that they are being lured into dangerous services by the Armed Forces. Overall, the community is worried that Hispanic men and women are being unjustly exposed to risky situations and sent to the front lines. One of the first U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq, Jose Gutierrez, was an orphan from Guatemala and not even a citizen at the time of his death.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos make up 9.5 percent of the active enlistees in the armed forces; they are over-represented in the most dangerous assignments, such as infantry, gun crews, and seamanship, and make up over 17.5 percent of the front lines.
(Whole thing.)
Further reading:
Conflict with Iraq: Study shows 20 percent of war deaths are blacks
Military Luring Black and Latino Youth With Hip-hop
Troops' Citizenship
BLOG POSTS
COMMENTS
PODCASTS
