To heal or to patch? Military mental health workers in Iraq
My new article — To heal or to patch? Military mental health workers in Iraq — is now out on OpEdNews and Dissident Voice. It discusses mental health treatment for American service members in Iraq, and the tendency to patch them up and send them back into combat. This “treatment” conflicts with the ethics guidelines of most mental health professions, which emphasize the duty to put the best interests of the patient first.
EXCERPT:
The Wall Street Journal has a new article on the role of mental health professionals in treating war trauma in Iraq Therapists take on soldiers’ trauma in Iraq]. The military has caught on to how these workers can aid the war effort and has increased their per capita numbers. Rather than seeking the best treatment to help traumatized soldiers recover from their stressful and horrific experiences, these professionals attempt to patch soldiers in order to return them to combat. As the article illustrates in its lead paragraph:
Lt. Maria Kimble, an Army mental-health worker, runs a two-person counseling team out of a small plywood office here. As part of a “combat stress detachment,” her job is to help soldiers cope with the horror of the battlefield — so that they can return to it as soon as possible.
Ethical questions are raised, and then ignored by these workers, who after all, are primarily involved in serving the war effort:
“There are a lot of ethical questions about it,” says Col. Levandowski. “The oath I take as a physician is to do no harm,” he says. But “ultimately, we are in the business of prosecuting a war.”
Clearly, the best interests of the patients are at best one of several factors weighed by these professionals:
“I do ache for these guys,” says Col. Levandowski. “But if you send too many (soldiers) home, the risk is that mental health will be seen as a ticket out of country.”
Success is measured as much by whether a soldier returns to combat as whether (s)he feels better….
1 comment November 29th, 2005