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Pentagon, Big Pharma
Drug Troops
to Numb Them to Horrors of War
By Penny Coleman
14/01/08 "AlterNet" - - - In June, the Department of Defense
Task Force on Mental Health acknowledged "daunting and growing"
psychological problems among our troops: Nearly 40 percent of
soldiers, a third of Marines and half of National Guard members
are presenting with serious mental health issues. They also
reported "fundamental weaknesses" in the U.S. military's
approach to psychological health. That report was followed in
August by the Army Suicide Event Report (ASER), which reported
that 2006 saw the highest rate of military suicides in 26 years.
And last month, CBS News reported that, based on its own
extensive research, over 6,250 American veterans took their own
lives in 2005 alone -- that works out to a little more than 17
suicides every day.
That's all pretty bleak, but
there is reason for optimism in the long-overdue attention being
paid to the emotional and psychic cost of these new wars. The
shrill hypocrisy of an administration that has decked itself in
yellow ribbons and mandatory lapel pins while ignoring a human
crisis of monumental proportion is finally being exposed.
On Dec. 12, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif.,
chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, called a
hearing on "Stopping Suicides: Mental Health Challenges Within
the Department of Veterans Affairs." At that hearing suggestions
were raised and conversations begun that hopefully will bear
fruit.
But I find myself extremely
anxious in the face of some of these new suggestions,
specifically what is being called the Psychological Kevlar Act
of 2007 and use of the drug propranalol to treat the symptoms of
posttraumatic stress injuries. Though both, at least in theory,
sound entirely reasonable, even desirable, in the wrong hands,
under the wrong leadership, they could make the sci-fi fantasies
of Blade Runner seem prescient.
The Psychological Kevlar Act
"directs the secretary of defense to develop and implement a
plan to incorporate preventive and early-intervention measures,
practices or procedures that reduce the likelihood that
personnel in combat will develop post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) or other stress-related psychopathologies, including
substance use conditions. (Kevlar, a DuPont fiber, is an
essential component of U.S. military helmets and bullet-proof
vests advertised to be "five times stronger than steel.") The
stated purpose of this legislation is to make American soldiers
less vulnerable to the combat stressors that so often result in
psychic injuries.
On the face of it, the bill
sounds logical and even compassionate. After all, our soldiers
are supplied with physical armor -- at least in theory. So why
not mental? My guess is that the representatives who have signed
on to this bill are genuinely concerned about the welfare of
troops and their families. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., is the
bill's sponsor, and I have no reason to question his genuine
commitment to mental health issues, both within and outside of
the military. Still, I find myself chilled at the prospects. To
explain my discomfort, I need to go briefly into the history of
military training.
Since World War II, our military
has sought and found any number of ways to override the values
and belief systems recruits have absorbed from their families,
schools, communities and religions. Using the principles of
operant conditioning, the military has found ways to reprogram
their human software, overriding those characteristics that are
inconvenient in a military context, most particularly the
inherent resistance human beings have to killing others of their
own species. "Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act
reflexively to stimuli," says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor
of philosophy and ethics at West Point, "and this maximizes
soldiers' lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral
autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering
the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to
kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are
unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed
another human being, they will likely -- and understandably --
suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the
lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat."
By military standards, operant
conditioning has been highly effective. It's enabled American
soldiers to kill more often and more efficiently, and that
ability continues to exact a terrible toll on those we have
designated as the "enemy." But the toll on the troops themselves
is also tragic. Even when troops struggle honorably with the
difference between a protected person and a permissible target
(and I believe that the vast majority do so struggle, though the
distinction is one I find both ethically and humanely
problematic) in war "shit happens." When soldiers are witness to
overwhelming horror, or because of a reflexive accident, an
illegitimate order, or because multiple deployments have
thoroughly distorted their perceptions, or simply because they
are in the wrong place at the wrong time -- those are the
moments that will continue to haunt them, the memories they will
not be able to forgive or forget, and the stuff of posttraumatic
stress injuries.
And it's not just the inherent
conscientious objector our military finds inconvenient: current
U.S. military training also
includes a component to desensitize male soldiers to the
sounds of women being raped, so the enemy cannot use the cries
of their fellow soldiers to leverage information. I think it not
unreasonable to connect such desensitization techniques to the
rates of domestic violence in the military, which are, according
to the DoD,
five times those in the civilian population. Is anyone
really surprised that men who have been specifically trained to
ignore the pain and fear of women have a difficult time coming
home to their wives and families? And clearly they do. There
were 2,374 reported cases of sexual assault in the military in
2005, a 40 percent increase over 2004. But that figure
represents only reported cases, and, as Air Force Brig. Gen.
K.C. McClain, commander of DoD's Joint Task Force for Sexual
Assault Prevention and Response
pointed out, "Studies indicate that only 5 percent of sexual
assaults are reported."
I have thought a lot about the
implications of "psychological Kevlar" -- what kind of
"preventive and early-intervention measures, practices or
procedures" might be developed that would "reduce the likelihood
that personnel in combat will develop post-traumatic stress
disorder." How would a soldier with a shield against moral
response "five times stronger than steel" behave?
I cannot convince myself that
what is really being promoted isn't a form of moral lobotomy.
I cannot imagine what aspects of
selfhood will have to be excised or paralyzed so soldiers will
no longer be troubled by what they, not to mention we, would
otherwise consider morally repugnant. A soldier who has lost an
arm can be welcomed home because he or she still shares
fundamental societal values. But the soldier who sees her friend
emulsified by a bomb, or who is ordered to run over children in
the road rather than slow down the convoy, or who realizes too
late that the woman was carrying a baby, not a bomb -- if that
soldier's ability to feel terror and horror has been amputated,
if he or she can no longer be appalled or haunted, something far
more precious has been lost. I am afraid that the training or
conditioning or drug that will be developed to protect soldiers
from such injuries will leave an indifference to violence that
will make them unrecognizable to themselves and to those who
love them. They will be alienated and isolated, and finally
unable to come home.
Posttraumatic stress injuries
can devastate the lives of soldiers and their families. The
suicides that are so often the result of such injuries make it
clear that they can be every bit as lethal as bullets or bombs,
and to date no cure has been found. Treatment and disability
payments, both for injured troops and their families, are a huge
budgetary concern that becomes ever more daunting as these wars
drag on. The Psychological Kevlar Act perhaps holds out the
promise of a prophylactic remedy, but it should come as no
surprise that Big Pharma has been looking for a chemical
intervention.
What they have come up with has
already been dubbed "the mourning after pill." Propranalol, if
taken immediately following a traumatic event, can subdue a
victim's stress response and so soften his or her perception of
the memory. That does not mean the memory has been erased, but
proponents claim that the drug can render it emotionally
toothless.
If your daughter were raped, the
argument goes, wouldn't you want to spare her a traumatic memory
that might well ruin her life? As the mother of a 23-year old
daughter, I can certainly understand the appeal of that
argument. And a drug that could prevent the terrible effects of
traumatic injuries in soldiers? If I were the parent of a
soldier suffering from such a life-altering injury, I can
imagine being similarly persuaded.
Not surprisingly, the Army is
already on board. Propranolol is a well-tolerated medication
that has been used for years for other purposes.
And it is inexpensive.
But is it moral to weaken
memories of horrendous acts a person has committed? Some would
say that there is no difference between offering injured
soldiers penicillin to prevent an infection and giving a drug
that prevents them from suffering from a posttraumatic stress
injury for the rest of their lives. Others, like Leon Kass,
former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, object
to propranolol's use on the grounds that it medicates away one's
conscience. "It's the morning-after pill for just about anything
that produces regret, remorse, pain or guilt," he says. Barry
Romo, a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the
War, is even more blunt. "That's the devil pill," he says.
"That's the monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That's the
pill that can make men and women do anything and think they can
get away with it. Even if it doesn't work, what's scary is that
a young soldier could believe it will."
It doesn't take a neuroscientist
to see the problem with both of these solutions. Though both
hold the promise of relief from the effects of an injury that
causes unspeakable pain, they do so at what appears to be great
cost. Whatever research projects might be funded by the
Psychological Kevlar Act and whatever use is made of propranolol,
they will almost certainly involve a diminished range of
feelings and memory, without which soldiers and veterans will be
different. But in what ways?
I wish I could trust the
leadership of our country to prioritize the lives and well-being
of our citizens. I don't. The last six years have clearly shown
the extent to which this administration is willing to go to use
soldiers for its own ends, discarding them when they are
damaged. Will efforts be made to fix what has been broken?
Return what has been taken? Bring them home? Will citizens be
enlightened about what we are condoning in our ignorance,
dispassion or indifference? Or will these two solutions simply
bring us closer to realizing the bullet-proof mind, devoid of
the inconvenient vulnerability of decent human beings to
atrocity and horror? And finally, these are all questions about
the morality of proposals that are trying to prevent injuries
without changing the social circumstances that bring them about,
which sidestep the most fundamental moral dilemma: that of
sending people to war in the first place.
Penny Coleman is the widow of
a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her
latest book,
Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the
Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her
blog is Flashback.
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