Belleruth Naparstek has a good piece at the Huffington Post about the differing climate facing returning veterans from the Iraq/Afghan conflicts and the Vietnam War 40 years ago. She comments on medical advances in the understanding/diagnosis of PTSD, the cultural shift in valuing the sacrifices made by our service men and women, and a change in the DoD’s and VA’s attitude to treating  psychological wounds.

This new group of active military in Iraq and Afghanistan knows what’s happening to them, to a much greater extent. There’s been a push to educate our troops and the general public about posttraumatic stress as well as TBI’s (traumatic brain injury), thanks to a renewed commitment to the mental health of our troops, found in both the Department of Defense and the V.A. Secretaries Gates and Shinseki have been working hard at destigmatizing mental health problems, in ways never seen before. So that’s another lesson learned from Vietnam, and no small matter. Still, career soldiers still worry a lot about stigma.

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So now that we’re learning about the new barriers to receiving help — some quite positive, by the way (Indeed, what’s wrong with not wanting to be a career patient, anyway?), I expect the V.A. will get more flexible in how it offers services. And there will hopefully be much more widespread use of self-administered guided imagery downloads — shown at multiple research sites to reduce symptoms quickly and pretty dramatically while being a pleasant and self-reinforcing experience for the listener. Not to mention inexpensive and useable even in remote locations.

We are getting so much more interest and openness to guided imagery than even a year ago, from both the DoD and the VA. These are great trends, very hopeful. I do believe we’re gonna seriously help a lot of vets.

It’s a good read with some interesting discussion going on in the comments section; check out the full article here.