Scores of people moved silently along the Wall, viewing the names of the men and women who died in that war. Some stopped and took pictures. One group of men about my age surrounded one name for a photo. Two young women posed in front of another, perhaps a grandfather or great uncle they never got to meet.
It is always an incredibly moving experience to visit the Wall. It treats each of the people it memorializes with respect. There is no rank among those honored. Officer or enlisted, rich or poor, each is given equal space and weight.
It is a form of acknowledgement and respect for which many veterans still fight.
Brave Vietnam veterans returned from Southeast Asia to educate our nation about the effects of war and violence.I didn’t know anything about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I entered the Connecticut Legislature in the late 1970s. I had only vaguely heard of “shell shock” from which some World War I and II veterans suffered. At that time, the condition, like the way we thought of other mental illnesses, suggested some sort of stigmatizing weakness inherent in the individual.
Vietnam veterans changed our thinking.
They knew that PTSD was a real mental illness caused by violence.
It took courage and strength to deliver this message to a nation not ready to hear it. We didn’t know then that the violence of war, the violence of neighborhoods and families, and the trauma of natural disasters cause this illness.
As a result of their advocacy, the National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study (NVVRS) was conducted in 1983.
It found that a startling 830,000 Vietnam Veterans (26%) reported symptoms of PTSD, and many thousands more had other mental illnesses, such as Depression. As the National Center for PTSD summarizes, a re-analysis of the data twenty years later suggested that up to a staggering 80% of Vietnam veterans reported at least some symptoms related to PTSD.
The Persian Gulf War introduced a new illness, Gulf War Syndrome, to our lexicon. It is characterized by both physical and mental health problems. Only 8% of Gulf War veterans have been diagnosed with PTSD, possibly because their exposure to violence was of shorter duration. But nearly 38%, or 263,000, Gulf War veterans sought treatment from the VA alone for illnesses and chronic conditions, many related to Gulf War Syndrome.
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, an estimated 10% to 18% of returning Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans have PTSD, and up to 25% will have Depression.
Mental illness is as devastating in veterans as it is in any population. According to the National Coalition on Homeless Veterans, on any given night 107,000 veterans are homeless. 76% of these men and women have behavioral health illnesses. 140,000 are imprisoned. Half of these have mental health problems.
While I was in Washington, I attended a dinner with my wife Pam and her colleagues at Mental Health America and its affiliates around the country, at the completion of their annual conference and before the ringing of their symbolic freedom bell, forged from the chains once worn by people locked in mental institutions. The 2011 Clifford Beers Award winner, Dr. Patricia Deegan, a survivor of schizophrenia, spoke of the courage of those who refuse to give in to the diagnosis of serious mental illness and to let it define them.
The Vietnam veterans who lobbied me had such courage, and refused to let PTSD define them.
We have fought three seemingly endless ten-year-plus wars in the last fifty years, and another one which caused significant physical and mental damage to its participants. Millions of veterans and their families have been affected by PTSD.
Thousands of others who have been exposed to violence, terrorism, and natural disasters also share this experience.
This should teach us an important lesson.Mental illness doesn’t cause violence, but exposure to violence causes mental illness.
One of the things I love most about America is that although we are so diverse, we share a common purpose.
The people whose names are on our national monuments - Washington, Lincoln, and the 58,272 on the Wall – remind us that this common purpose involves an entitlement to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
June 27 is PTSD Awareness Day. It is a good day to remind ourselves why the bells of freedom mean so much to us all, especially the 7% of all adult Americans with PTSD.
The people whose names are on that Wall are remembered for sacrificing to give the rest of us a safer, more secure life. They would not have forgotten those who came home with mental illness.
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