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Fort Hood Ground Zero for Innovative Mental Health Training
November 06, 2009 5:35 PM
ABC's Whitney Lloyd reports from New York:
Fort Hood – where 13 soldiers were killed and 34 more shot by a fellow soldier yesterday – is at the forefront of an Army experiment to combat the emotional assault of war on soldiers.
Major Nidal Malki Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who had treated soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, unleashed his own frustration and fear of an upcoming deployment to Afghanistan in a hail of bullets at Fort Hood – one of only two Army bases participating in a newly launched program to train soldiers in “emotional resiliency.”
Opened just last month, the Fort Hood Resiliency Campus is the Army’s first such facility. It stretches across a city block on the 340-square mile base, complete with such resort-like amenities as a rock climbing wall, yoga studio, juice bar and classrooms where soldiers are taught to be mentally tough.
Using psychological techniques developed at the University of Pennsylvania, soldiers are trained in weekly 90-minute classes to defuse habitual, frustrating ways of thinking that can add to soldiers’ stress.
One training exercise the program uses is that of an unanswered phone call home when deployed. Rather than assume that an unanswered call means their wife is cheating on them, soldiers are taught to recalibrate their thoughts and realize that their wife is most likely busy with their children.
These techniques of mentally disputing irrational thoughts were originally developed for middle and high school students and have been successful in reducing stress and raising students’ grades.
Critics of the Army’s new program doubt the same techniques will be effective for soldiers dealing with roadside bombs, comrades’ deaths and family stress.
“It’s important to be clear that there’s no evidence that any program makes soldiers more resilient, “ George Bonanno, a Columbia University psychologist told The New York Times.
Ultimately, the Army will require all 1.1 million soldiers to undergo this mental training and will track its impact on their mental health through a 170-item questionnaire.
But for Fort Hood, the Army’s inaugural mental health experiment happening on base may prove to be too little too late.
November 6, 2009 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (4)
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it is weird that psychiatrists and psychologists often seem to have frustrated and weird lives. Usually this is protrated in movies as laughable. It is also weird about the Va Tech association. But ultimately the motivation seems clear by his internet postings, garb, and ultimate actions. And due to political correctness and "moral waivers" we didn't stop this in the bud. It is sad that we delude ourselves to our detrement.
We should be focusing on the REAL victim of this Muslim extremist. And focusing on the REAL problems that military people have as a result of war. To claim this murderer is PTSD like real troops is shocking. The people that promoted him should be court martialled and demoted. His loans and moneys spend by us should be garnished from his savings and his family at minimum.
Posted by: Ed | Nov 6, 2009 11:21:12 PM
Hasan completed training in disaster and preventive psychiatry. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Hasan had a poor performance record at Walter Reed.
Walter Reed than passed Hasan on to
Fort Hood.
His oppositional ways escalated towards the end. He was a psychiatrist that treated soldiers with PTSD, but he wore the Muslim garb in public.
"They" (I suppose Fort Hood) was "looking at him" - it's been reported.
If he was on their radar, there must have been a whole lot of blinking going on.
Also, what about that gun shop who sold him the "cop killer" gun? This shop owner needs to answer some questions, don't you think?
If this is legal, then we do need to change that law.
Maybe this will spark some action.
Posted by: ddg | Nov 7, 2009 1:46:05 PM
The soldier who killed other soldiers at Ft. Hood had demonstrated behavior that needed attention. To understand why he did what he did with the goal of stopping someone else from doing the same thing, we all need to focus on his issues, not his religion.
During WWII Lutherans and Catholics from Minneapolis and Milwaukee killed Lutherans and Catholics wearing different uniforms from Munich and Mannheim. Perhaps where your mosque is located could produce the same kind of confrontation. During my own tour of duty in the Balkans my job as a NATO peacekeeper was to confront those engaged in ethnic cleansing. The fact that I was Orthodox might have seemed to put me on the same side as the Orthodox Christian Serbs. When my interpreter explained to the Serbs and Muslim Bosnians and Albanians that while my religion was Orthodox my ethnic background was Swiss and Cherokee Indian. The Cherokee people had been marched at gun point from their homes in the Carolinas to the Oklahoma Territory and so my family had their own stories about ethnic cleansing and I didn’t give a damn what someone wore around their neck –cross or cressant..
Our beliefs, language and ethnic heritage form core elements of individual identity and can set us apart from those with whom we don’t seem to have much in common. At no time do any of those beliefs or circumstantial elements make us more or less human beings with all the psychological and physiological vulnerabilities we share as a species.
Extremist come in many political and religious flavors. Preventing horrific incidents such as the shooting at Virginia Tech and now Ft. Hood require all of us to be aware of the fragile balance between McCarthy era tactics of rumor mongering and denouncing our neighbors and the pathetic soul searching of people who realized too late that they should have said something. The fact that the soldier was psychiatrist indicates he was around other professionals who should have known better.
Robert D. Burgener, MA Chief Warrant Officer U.S. Army (retired) Masters in Refugee Care, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies University of Essex, UK
Posted by: Robert | Nov 7, 2009 10:04:57 PM
There's more to this story than we know right now. Hopefully we will learn more and answer some of these questions. Prayers go out to all involved.
Posted by: Thuey | Nov 9, 2009 2:22:15 AM
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