Brain and Mind Injuries Go Untreated

An activist travels to the DoD's annual suicide prevention conference, only to find the military brass living in a parallel universe.

The report revealed that nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan -- that's 300,000 men and women -- have symptoms of post-traumatic stress or major depression. Of those, only slightly more than half have sought VA treatment. Soldiers say that hesitation to seek help arises from fear that it will harm their careers.

But word gets around. Even among those who do seek help, RAND estimates that only about half receive treatment their researchers consider "minimally adequate." So why bother.

The study also estimates that about 320,000 service members may have experienced a traumatic brain injury during deployment, but that just 43 percent reported ever being evaluated by a physician for that injury, despite DoD's policy that every soldier returning from Iraq be screened. More