USA Today (4/4, Zoroya) reports, “The Pentagon said Thursday that more than 155,000 US troops have PTSD and that more than three-quarters of them are combat veterans.” Approximately “1,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan war era are diagnosed each week with post-traumatic stress disorder and more than 800 with depression, according to VA statistics.”
The National Journal (4/4, Vasilogambros, Subscription Publication) reports that Craig Bryan, executive director of the National Center for Veterans Studies, believes that soldiers can “get PTSD without actually seeing combat,” and the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, “changed its criteria for PTSD to no longer require that a person must have been in a life-threatening situation.” In fact, “the APA found that many members of the military and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though they didn’t think they were going to die, manifested the problems associated with PTSD.”
Related Links:
— “Military playing catch-up on PTSD,” Gregg Zoroya, Military Times, April 3, 2014.