Overcoming Trauma

In a column for the Online Quill, 2005 Ochberg Fellow Melissa Manware recalls some of the hundreds of violent deaths and rapes from her decade covering cops for the Charlotte Observer. Crime stories like these are hard, but her career has shown they are also where a reporter can have her greatest impact; if she can remain both hopeful and emotionally touched. As she recounts:

A few years ago, I wrote about Kristen Smith, a teenager who told her family that she had been molested by a relative when she was 9. Days later, I got a call from a woman in her 40s. She wanted me to know that reading Kristen’s story gave her the courage to finally talk about what happened to her. She was molested as a child and until that day had never told anyone.

That’s what made the work worth the heartache. And that’s what a reporter, especially a crime reporter, has to remember to stay positive when so many of the stories are negative.

In-Depth Series: Veterans with PTSD

Last week, Alysa Landry at the Daily Times in Farmington, New Mexico penned a moving three-part series on veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Part one, Combat that Never Ends, tells the stories of Vietnam veterans who have wrestled with PTSD for decades, but only recently been diagnosed or treated. In part two, The Front Lines Shift... Military Veterans Face Varying Battles, veterans from Iraq repeat the pattern. In fact, Robert Udero of the Farmington Veteran Center says the proportion of veterans suffering from PTSD may be nearly three times higher for Iraq than for Vietnam. Part three, The Search for Combat Trauma Solutions, turns from veterans' suffering to their treatment and recovery. It ends by returning to John Collard, who we met in part one with a gun in his mouth, fighting back two-decade-old memories of the year he spent "covered in blood" as a medic in Vietnam. He was diagnosed with PTSD and began treatment five years ago.

"At 60 years old, I'm about to get my life together," he said. "It's been since 1969 that I've been dealing with this, and to this day, I look back and it's still hard to make sense of it. But I'm 60 years old and I have a future."

Military Psychiatric Screening Lags

In the Hartford Courant, Matthew Kauffman and Lisa Chedekel report that, despite the Pentagon’s promises to the contrary, the military continues to refer a far smaller proportion of troops to mental-health professionals than actually have mental-health problems. Less than 1 percent of deploying troops are currently referred, even though several military studies show that nearly 10 percent have mental-health problems.

The Courant won awards for its 2006 coverage of mentally unfit soldiers. Later that year, the Pentagon claimed it would improve this screening process, but an infographic accompanying this week's story reveals that the subsequent increase in referrals was only temporary.

Kauffman and Chedekel's story comes on the heels of the first hearing of a class-action lawsuit against the VA filed by two veterans’ groups, demanding improved screening and treatment of potentially suicidal veterans. As of the end of 2005, 144 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide, the AP's Bradley Brooks reports. During the hearing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder expert Dr. Arthur Blank testified that up to 30% of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from PTSD, a statistic which headlined John Koopman's coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Virginia Learns from Columbine

As the one year anniversary of the Virgina Tech massacre approaches, Donna Alvis-Banks of the Roanoke Times seeks guidance from the survivors of the Columbine school shooting. Alvis-Banks, a 2007 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow reports that, "the key to moving on, the survivors of Columbine say, is a mix of individual trial and error and recognizing that the community as a whole needs mental health outreach." Their advice and moving stories bring a hopeful message of recovery to communities recovering from shocking communal trauma, from Blacksburg, Virginia to Dekalb, Illinois.

You can read the Roanoke Times' complete coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings here, and find more articles and resources related to reporting on school shootings here under "Covering the NIU Shootings."

Assault Victims Seek Military Justice

Judy Holland of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer carefully documents sexual assault within the military. Statistics and victims’ stories provide context for proposed legislation that would require an investigation into the handling of these cases and provide support for female veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

James Risen of the New York Times reports on a related story: sexual assault by military contractors. As Risen reports, in contrast to military personnel, contractors cannot even be prosecuted under the military justice system. This leaves women like Mary Beth Kineston, fired by military contractor KBR after complaining of multiple cases of sexual assault, in “legal limbo.” “I still have nightmares,” Ms. Kineston says in the article. “They changed my life forever, and they got away with it.” Although the number of private contractors now significantly outnumbers military personnel, totaling approximately 180,000, the total number of cases of sexual assault by contractors have not been forthcoming.

Honoring a Victim of PTSD

Linda Tyssen of the Mesabi Daily News reports on the naming of AMVETS Post 33 after Noah Charles Pierce: a 23-year-old Army veteran of the war in Iraq who committed suicide in July, following a battle with post-traumatic stress disorder. Honoring Pierce's service, and treating his death as a casualty of war marks a paradigm shift from previous eras, when mental trauma was ignored, denied, and treated as an aberration. As the article quotes Commander Shawn Carr, who had sought to name the post for Pierce when it was first chartered, "As far as I’m concerned, Noah died of injuries received in combat."

Self-Medicating Veterans

Six journalism grad students working with ABC’s 20/20 spent the summer investigating the stories of soldiers who abuse drugs. In their TV report, soldiers speak to the students of going into war drug-free, but turning to cocaine, amphetamines, and prescription drugs to deal with their traumatic experiences. The military, on the other hand, seems unwilling to admit it has a problem.

Major Gamal Awad, for examples, tells of being diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after rescuing survivors from the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, only to be re-deployed to Iraq. He says he was prescribed antidepressants so he could stay in the field. “I told them that I was having suicidal thoughts, that I would go out on convoys with the purpose to die,” he says in the interview. “It was hell.”

As 20/20's Brian Ross concludes,

“Our students uncovered that for those soldiers who did put their lives on the line and were affected by the trauma of war and did turn to drugs, it is a difficult lonely battle, and one the military would rather pretend is not happening.”

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