The "Center of Excellence" has been shown to be dysfunctional and the troops have been paying the price for all of this. Why do they keep spending money on what does not work? Because people are making money off all of this without having to prove what they do even works.
Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress
Established: 1987
Read Report Here
DCOE is a relatively small entity and it does not typically appear in DOD DHP budget presentation materials and falls below the most detailed level that is presented—the Budget Activity Group level.28 DCOEhasonly appeared in DOD’s budget presentation materials for fiscal year 2010, when PH and TBI funding was first included in the DHP base budget request.29 In there quest,DOD did not specify that DCOE’s individual budget request for 2010 was only about $168 million 30 of the $800 million requested. Specifically, the request stated “$0.8B to fund operations of the Defense Center of Excellence (DCoE) for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, and to ensure that critical wartime medical and health professionals are available to provide needed mental health services by improving hiring and retention bonuses and offering targeted special pay.”
Report: Pentagon Center For Brain Injuries, PTSD Is Dysfunctional
Categories: Military, Health, National News
07:52 am
July 11, 2011
by T. CHRISTIAN MILLER and DANIEL ZWERDLING
The military center that's supposed to lead the effort to find the best ways to diagnose and treat traumatic brain injuries and post traumatic stress disorder is so dysfunctional that it's been hard to carry out its mission, the Government Accountability Office concludes in a new report.
The Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE) was created in 2007 after Congress told the Pentagon to set up a national center to deal with many of the troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan who had suffered brain injuries from explosions and were suffering from PTSD. The program was supposed to lead a ground-breaking campaign to figure out the best ways to fight these injuries.
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Pentagon Center For Brain Injuries, PTSD Is Dysfunctional
These programs were built to fail. The Pentagon does not want to acknowledge the wounded and pay disability.
ReplyDeleteCongress and the DoD funnelled money to their favorite pet contractors and causes to make it appear as if something was being done.
Norm Dicks gets to special mood trackers and alternative medicine is all the rage.
These guys will be in homeless shelters, on the streets and in jail courtesy of Medcom and a do nothing congress.
There are a lot of good people wanting to help in congress. The problem comes when other people decide what gets funding and what is ignored.
ReplyDeleteMost of the programs the DOD and the VA have are nothing more than research programs using the troops as test rats.
Battlemind, the star program a while back, told the troops they could train their brain to be tough and that was a killer. They ended up walking away believing if they ended up with PTSD, it was their fault for not training to be "tough enough" to deal with it. The suicide rate went up. What did the DOD do? They repeated the same mistakes with programs just like it under different titles.
Then there are the medications. You know companies are making huge profits off the drugs the troops are given even though every expert I've tracked over all these years has said medications are not the answer. They are needed to level off the chemicals in the brain so that therapy has a chance to work, but they are being used as the solution when therapy is all but ignored for most of them.
How do they expect to heal something caused by the traumas of combat with a pill? It doesn't happen.
Therapy is the least expensive of all and it helps them heal from where they've been. Spiritual therapy is even less expensive but even though it works the best considering what PTSD is, it is the least supported.