US military and its CYA mental health program

All branches of the armed forces claim to support people who undergo mental evaluation and treatment, but all too often that is a lie.

I only recently learned that after coming home from deployment to a war zone, soldiers are asked questions concerning combat activities, questions such as whether the soldier ever saw a dead body, saw American dead, handled remains or was involved in an IED incident that might have produced psychological or brain trauma.

A “Yes” answer to any question immediately leads to appointments with psychologists and/or psychiatrists.

Medical appointments mean a soldier is not available for every-day duty. More troubling is supervisors or commanders who see mental health appointments as an indication of weakness. That opinion is transferred to soldiers, who then might question their own competence.

To avoid leaders’ ideas of weakness, soldiers lie. I did not see any dead bodies. I did not handle the remains of American dead. I received three IED attack, but not close enough to cause damage.

Military commanders despise anything that hampers their pre-conceived ideas of what a soldier should be and the amount of damage a soldier can take before his performance degrades.

The best treatment does not involve mental health professionals, but other soldiers who have experienced the same events. Generally, a mental health professional knows only what he/she learned from books and has absolutely no idea what a soldier does. And in today’s military, mental health professionals are likely to be civilians who have zero military experience.

In establishing its present mental health treatment program, the armed services did nothing but set up a system of check the boxes so as to make their civilian political bosses happy and give those bosses a platform from which to say, “See, we are doing something.” That the something does not work is a matter of little meaning to military leaders and their political bosses.