Fort Carson – The Army’s biggest challenge in treating soldiers who return from Iraq with mental-health problems is to convince them that seeking treatment will not ruin their military careers, the service’s top medical officer said Thursday.
The Army’s surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, visited Fort Carson on Thursday to assess the mental-health-care program on post. Fort Carson also held a private town-hall meeting with soldiers to talk about mental-health issues.
Kiley said soldiers worry that their careers will end if they seek mental-health treatment.
“Our Army, our armed forces culture, is one of toughness and ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps,”‘ Kiley said.
He said the Army needs to continue informing soldiers that “it’s not only OK, but it is encouraged to seek mental-health services.”
Kiley is co-chairman of a recently established Task Force on Mental Health that examines matters related to mental health and the armed forces.
The 14-member task force, composed of military and nonmilitary representatives, has assessed mental health care at more than 30 U.S. military installations. The task force will submit a report to the secretary of defense in May, and that report will then be forwarded to Congress.
The second challenge for the Army, Kiley said Thursday, is to make sure that installations have enough mental-health experts so soldiers can conveniently access treatment. Kiley said Fort Carson has enough with its 38 doctors, psychologists and social workers.
The Army estimates that between 15 percent and 30 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq report post-traumatic stress symptoms and other mental-health problems. In 2006, Fort Carson diagnosed 590 soldiers with PTSD, compared with 32 cases diagnosed in 2002 before the war started.
“Every soldier who serves in combat is changed by the experience,” Kiley said. But, he said, with early treatment, most soldiers can fully recover.
Fort Carson has been under scrutiny since The Denver Post and other news outlets reported of soldiers who said they were denied help, ostracized because they could not cope with mental-health issues and were discharged for misconduct that the soldiers said was related to PTSD.
“I do believe that this issue of – do we have a soldier who’s really struggling with PTSD who ends up using drugs or other criminal activity and therefore gets into trouble – it’s my intent, as part of the mental-health task force, to address that,” Kiley said.
Kiley said the Army is “becoming very aware that what in the past may have been viewed simply as disobedient behavior and insubordinate behavior may actually be a manifestation of PTSD – particularly soldiers that served in combat operations.”
Fort Carson recently has launched a training program to teach young sergeants and young lieutenants to be mindful of mental- health problems in troops.
“It’s designed to increase the awareness and increase the capability and to overcome some of these biases that have become part of the culture,” said Maj. Gen. Robert Mixon, commander of Fort Carson.
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
