Soldiers With Mental Health Issues Dismissed For 'Misconduct'

[Old Town FFX]

Pretty disgusting how the government does little to reintegrate the soldiers back into the society which they fought to protect. No excuses. If you can send them to war, you need to be able to handle the fallout afterwards. Shameful how some veterans are treated.

Missed Treatment: Soldiers With Mental Health Issues Dismissed For 'Misconduct' : NPR

Staff Sgt. Eric James, an Army sniper who served two tours in Iraq, paused before he walked into a psychiatrist's office at Fort Carson, Colo. It was April 3, 2014. James clicked record on his smartphone, and then tucked the phone and his car keys inside his cap as he walked through the door to the chair by the therapist's desk.

As he sat there sharing his fears and telling the therapist he'd been thinking about suicide — all while secretly recording the entire session — James was inadvertently helping to bring a problem within the Army to light: As it tries to deal with thousands of soldiers who misbehave after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and then being diagnosed with mental health disorders and traumatic brain injuries, the military sometimes moves to kick them out of the service rather than provide the treatment they need.

The Army tried to dismiss James in 2013, because he had been stopped for drunken driving two years earlier. This despite pledges by Army commanders and a 2009 congressional edict to make sure such misconduct is not the result of mental issues brought home from the wars.

Saying he wanted evidence to protect himself, James made secret recordings of more than 20 hours of sessions with therapists and officers at Fort Carson. In the recordings, counselors can be heard berating him for suggesting he has serious mental health problems. They try to convince him his experiences in Iraq were not too traumatic — and even seem to ignore him when he talks about wanting to commit suicide.

When Army leaders heard about the recordings, they ordered an investigation. It concluded that James had been mistreated, and two of his therapists were subsequently reprimanded.

But the general who runs the Army's medical system said the investigation also reached another conclusion: The mistreatment of soldiers at Fort Carson was "not systemic."

NPR and Colorado Public Radio also conducted an investigation, based on hours of secret recordings from James, hundreds of pages of confidential documents from Fort Carson, and interviews with dozens of sources both inside and outside the base. And that evidence suggests the Army failed to pursue key evidence in its investigation, ruling out claims of mistreatment from nine other war veterans without ever interviewing or even contacting the men.

And according to figures acquired by NPR and CPR under the Freedom of Information Act, the Army has been pushing out soldiers diagnosed with mental health problems not just at Fort Carson but at bases across the country.

The figures show that since January 2009, the Army has "separated" 22,000 soldiers for "misconduct" after they came back from Iraq and Afghanistan and were diagnosed with mental health problems or TBI. As a result, many of the dismissed soldiers have not received crucial retirement and health care benefits that soldiers receive with an honorable discharge.

The cases of the 10 soldiers we investigated raise a question: Why would commanders kick out soldiers for misconduct, instead of giving them more intensive treatment or a medical retirement on the grounds that they have persistent mental health problems? Sources both inside and outside Fort Carson suggested one possible answer: It takes less time and money to get rid of problem soldiers on the grounds of misconduct.

One of the Army's top officials who oversees mental health, Lt. Col. Chris Ivany, tells NPR and CPR that the Army is not violating the spirit of the 2009 law by dismissing tens of thousands of soldiers for misconduct after they came back from the wars, even though they were diagnosed with TBI or mental health disorders.

For instance, he says the soldiers' "functional impairment was not severe" enough in some cases to affect their judgment. In other cases, the soldiers' disorders might have been serious when they were diagnosed, but their "condition subsequently improved" before they committed misconduct — so they can't blame the war for causing them to misbehave.

And in other cases, Ivany says, soldiers' medical records show they were diagnosed with a mental health disorder — but only because a medical worker wrote it down as "a preliminary best estimate, but on further evaluation, the diagnosis was clarified" and perhaps dropped. All this "clearly shows that there is no systemic attempt" to dismiss soldiers with mental problems on the grounds of misconduct, Ivany says.

Army officials would not discuss any of the current and former soldiers' cases, on the grounds that they're protecting the men's privacy.

James says he never set out to "expose" Fort Carson or embarrass anybody. He says he started recording his meetings with officers and mental health staff to keep an accurate record of the conversations.

James' two tours in Iraq occurred during some of the bloodiest fighting. He watched through his sniper scope as his targets died and he saw his buddies die, too. He suffered a traumatic brain injury when his Humvee flipped upside down, according to Army records.

James' parents say he began to unravel after he returned to Fort Carson in 2009.

"It's pretty hard as a parent to see your kid go the way he did," says his father, Robert James. "He was happy-go-lucky. Now he's depressed, and he's always down and out."

"This isn't the boy, the young man, I raised," says his mother, Beverly Morris. "He is totally a whole different person."

James says after he came home from his last deployment, his life was in shambles.

"I was angry; I was getting in fights. I drank at least 12 beers every night, so I could pass out — that was the only way I could get any sleep. It's like my mom said, she was the person I'd always call, and I would call her, you know, after I'd been drinking so much and it's late at night and I'd tell her, 'Mom, look, I need help. Every day I wish I was dead,' " James says.

Then one night in 2011, local police pulled James over for drunken driving in Colorado Springs. Two years later, officers at Fort Carson told him they were going to "chapter" him out of the Army for misconduct, as a result of that DUI. James says he knew that meant he might never get the retirement pay or health insurance that the Army promised when he enlisted. Getting forced to leave without an honorable discharge could also mean that he could have trouble finding a decent job.

We first reported in 2006 that Fort Carson was kicking out some soldiers who had mental health problems and committed "misconduct," instead of helping them. Less than three years later, Congress passed the law to help stop the practice.

The law does not forbid the Army to dismiss troops with mental disorders who commit misconduct, but a spokesman for one of the key congressional committees that drafted the language says members of Congress "wanted to make sure the military was not putting people out that have service-related medical issues because the services have a responsibility to get them the care they need."

Secret Recordings Lead To Investigation

James' recordings veer from mundane conversations about scheduling appointments to sessions in which James despairs about his life.

In one, James tells a therapist that he feels angry and miserable most of the time. He doesn't trust anybody, and he isolates himself.

"Like, remember I told you I'm like, I feel like I'm coming into a combat zone when I drive on the base," he asks the counselor. And then he starts trying to talk about some of his scariest experiences in Iraq. "In, like, one month, there was over 1,000 IEDs and multiple ambushes."

Click Link for the rest of the article...