{"id":280,"date":"2009-11-18T16:11:33","date_gmt":"2009-11-18T22:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/?p=280"},"modified":"2009-11-18T16:11:33","modified_gmt":"2009-11-18T22:11:33","slug":"can-ptsd-be-eliminated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/can-ptsd-be-eliminated\/","title":{"rendered":"Can PTSD Be Eliminated?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sensitive Soldier:<\/strong>
\nCan US troops be rewired to be impervious to trauma? In the wake of Fort Hood, Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum launched a groundbreaking program to eliminate PTSD.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Gail Sheehy \/ The Daily Beast<\/p>\n

\u201cHow am I going to get people to focus not on tragedy, but on resilience?\u201d Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum asks rhetorically as we sit in her Pentagon office. The question is now Gen. Cornum\u2019s mission: She is charged with teaching the Army\u2019s warriors\u2014even in the wake of the homegrown tragedy at Fort Hood\u2014to persevere in the face of any crisis.<\/p>\n

Cornum\u2019s program represents a historic shift in the Army\u2019s training philosophy. Instead of lavishing resources on those warriors who have succumbed to post-traumatic stress, depression, drug dependency, DUI, or sought the ultimate escape of suicide, the Army this week began training its \u201chealthy\u201d soldiers in emotional and spiritual fitness.<\/p>\n

Cornum is uniquely qualified to be the nation\u2019s new director of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. In 1991, as a flight surgeon during the first Gulf War, she was taken prisoner when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq. After three days of beatings and humiliations, this mother of a then-14-year-old daughter was released from Iraqi prisons. Her resilience and heroism as a prisoner of war convinced many in the Pentagon that women could indeed serve on the frontlines. And unlike former POWs, Cornum stayed in the military.<\/p>\n

The new training program offers soldiers a tool kit of psychological techniques based on years of research. They can be just as useful in facing the fear of battlefield combat as in living room flare-ups. Senior military officers say the chief stressor in our current wars\u2014when spouses and parents can call their warriors on cellphones at any time, day or night\u2014are the fights that lead to family breakdown. But at a much deeper level is the emotional fallout from the nonstop cycling of soldiers through several deployments.<\/p>\n

And while Cornum acknowledges there are many hidden traumas for soldiers, she dismisses dwelling on the impact of the Fort Hood shootings. \u201cI don\u2019t think one individual act of murdering tells me anything about the fitness of the 1.1 million people in the force. It\u2019s a terrible tragedy. But there\u2019s no need to engage in catastrophic thinking,\u201d she says brusquely. \u201cJust move on and think about what you can do to make it better.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a doctor meeting with other generals in the day-after crisis meeting at the Department of Defense, Cornum did not recommend that any of the soldiers present in the killing room at Fort Hood be given a postponement of their overseas assignments.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not as if there\u2019s a choice,\u201d she says. \u201cSomebody else would have to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Clearly the Army did not stress this kind of emotional fitness training when Cornum joined back in the 1980s. But one suspects she would not have needed such preparation in the first place. \u201cI have always been a daredevil with a disciplined mind,\u201d she says. Fifty years old and still a compact 5-foot-5 and 120 pounds, encased in a digital-patterned combat uniform, the general plants one boot on her other knee, leans back, and boasts, \u201cI\u2019ve been jumping off barns and climbing trees since I could walk.\u201d She is also a veteran steeplechase jockey who had to put weights in her jodhpurs to keep her mount on the horse.<\/p>\n

Her source of resilience, she says, all comes from her life experiences. In addition to her time as a POW, Cornum has pulled injured soldiers out of wrecked helicopters, has performed surgery on friends in a makeshift emergency room, and has watched some die.<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t own a TV, and even if she did, she would not have subjected herself to the visual repetition of the carnage at the bloody Texas base. It\u2019s the same way she dealt with 9\/11. The only reason she saw that live on TV was because the neurology patients in her waiting room in Bosnia were glued to her office monitor. She thought they were watching some national sports event and stole a peek: \u201cI never watched another minute of footage from 9\/11, until the first year anniversary.\u201d<\/p>\n

While attending meetings on military health over the years with General George Casey, the Army chief of staff, Cornum planted the idea that the Army needs to be as psychologically fit as it is physically fit. She interested the top brass in focusing on the prevention of mental-health problems rather than treatment after the fact.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s the problem, sir,\u201d she would say. \u201cWe\u2019re devoting a great deal of effort to treating pathology, but 99 percent of people in the Army have normal reactions to fear and trauma. And we have done nothing for these people.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you assume, as I did, that training soldiers in emotional and spiritual fitness would be some sort of touchy-feely exercise in spilling the fears and feelings of one\u2019s inner child, you would be very mistaken. Cornum\u2019s training is about getting tougher\u2014and convincing yourself that you will come out of any \u201ckick in the gut,\u201d as Gen. Casey characterized the Fort Hood mass killing, all the stronger for it.<\/p>\n

Casey promoted Cornum to general and tasked her with finding a way to toughen up the millennial generation recruits who come to the Army much younger, in developmental age, accustomed to Mom and Dad wrapping them in knee pads and helmets and car seats, and expecting them to call home when they\u2019re out late on a Saturday night.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey bubble-wrap them,\u201d scoffs Cornum. \u201cThat teaches them that just about everything they do is dangerous.\u201d She was particularly appalled at learning a new statistic: Just 30 percent of recruits come into the Army today with a driver\u2019s license. \u201cThat means 70 percent don\u2019t get a license as soon as they can,\u201d says the general, in amazement. \u201cDoes that mean they still expect Mom and Dad to drive them around?\u201d She plays out this ludicrous notion. \u201cHow do they even get pregnant? Does Mommy drive them around while they do it the back of the SUV?\u201d<\/p>\n

She sees a disturbing disparity between the coddling of many of today\u2019s Army-age youngsters and the 360-degree dangers they will face in the \u201cpersistent conflict\u201d in Iraq and Afghanistan. \u201cYou can be talking to a sergeant and all of a sudden he\u2019s snipered,\u201d she says. That\u2019s why she sees training in emotional and spiritual toughness, along with family and social resilience, to be every bit as essential as one-arm pushups to keep our military strong.<\/p>\n

Driving herself to work at the Pentagon last Friday morning after the gruesome shooting spree by a psychiatrist, Cornum practiced what she preaches. She avoided catastrophic thoughts by thinking back to her time as a POW.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was shot down [and moved from bunker to bunker and finally to one of Saddam\u2019s prisons], people asked, how did I maintain my good attitude and not just implode?\u201d she says. \u201cIt was the absolute confidence that the Army was going to come get me. That\u2019s the most important thing that we have\u2014and it isn\u2019t necessarily a core value of the rest of society\u2014which is: \u2018Never leave a fallen comrade.\u2019 I was on my way to get somebody else, and got shot down en route. I knew that somebody was going to say yes to coming to find me. They would either be successful or they would turn the whole country into glass looking for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

And she matter-of-factly dismisses any notion of PTSD: \u201cNo post-trauma. No nightmares. No difficulty relating to my family. No intrusive thoughts.\u201d Having exhausted the list of the most common post-traumatic stress reactions, she acknowledges one chink in her full metal jacket: \u201cI did have some feelings of invincibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her biggest problem was how to transition to the tedious safety of civilian life. \u201cI went out and bought a new bright red Dodge Stealth,\u201d she boasts, \u201cand ditched a 10-year-old diesel Rabbit that couldn\u2019t go over 55 mph except downhill.\u201d She laughs heartily. \u201cI asked my husband, \u2018Is this my version of post-traumatic stress? Driving too fast?\u2019 But I got over it by the end of a year.\u201d<\/p>\n

It all sounds too perfect. But Cornum appears to have been born an \u201cinvulnerable,\u201d a personality type that psychologists find is rare but somehow protected, perhaps by brain chemistry, from breaking under almost any stress.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes you gotta package up your feelings and get on with the mission,\u201d she says. \u201cThen you can let them out when it\u2019s more convenient and deal with them. I let myself cry at memorials.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the original story here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sensitive Soldier: Can US troops be rewired to be impervious to trauma? In the wake of Fort Hood, Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum launched a groundbreaking program to eliminate PTSD. By Gail Sheehy \/ The Daily Beast \u201cHow am I going to get people to focus not on tragedy, but on resilience?\u201d Brigadier General Rhonda […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,8,6,15],"tags":[52,39,55,30,75,162,31],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-understanding-ptsd","category-communication","category-press","category-relationship-changes","tag-combat","tag-deployment","tag-military","tag-ptsd","tag-resilience","tag-trauma","tag-warrior"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":362,"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myheroesathome.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}