Every member of Congress needs to know the story of Staff Sargeant Travis Twiggs. Travis did four tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq and lost a battle with PTSD. He did seek therapy for his PTSD and was on twelve different medications at one time. However, he kept getting sent back to Iraq or Afghanistan where his PTSD would flare up again when his tour was over. Here's a snippet from Raw Story about the Marine's own story about his battle with the illness:
When he came home, "All of my symptoms were back, and now I was in the process of destroying my family," he wrote. "My only regrets are how I let my command down after they had put so much trust in me and how I let my family down by pushing them away."
Kellee Twiggs said her husband was "very, very different, angry, agitated, isolated and so forth," upon his return. "He was just doing crazy things."
She said her husband was treated in the psychiatric ward of Bethesda Naval Medical Center and then sent to a Veterans Administration facility for four months.
Most recently, Travis Twiggs was assigned to the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, a job he said helped him "get my life back on track."
"Every day is a better day now," he wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette. "...Looking back, I don't believe anyone is to blame for my craziness, but I do think we can do better."
Twiggs urged others suffering from similar problems to seek help. "PTSD is not a weakness. It is a normal reaction to a very violent situation," he wrote.
Kellee Twiggs said she can't understand why her husband was not sent to a specialized PTSD clinic in New Jersey.
"They let him out. He was OK for a while and then it all started over again," she said.
They let him out. Sadly, Travis Twiggs ended up stealing a car with his brother and attempting to drive off into the Grand Canyon. By the time the cops caught up to the vehicle, Travis Twiggs had killed his brother and then himself.
Awhile back I wrote a diary about our soldiers not seeking treatment after sustaining brain injuries in Iraq. Many soldiers are also not seeking treatment for PTSD, which is a serious plague taking hold of countless soldiers. The RAND Corporation, a non-profit organization released a 500 page report and interviewed nearly two thousand Veterans in all levels of the Armed Forces. What they found was that nearly 20% of our soldiers are suffering from PTSD. Here's a snippet about the findings:
Some 300,000 U.S. troops are suffering from major depression or post traumatic stress from serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 320,000 received brain injuries, a new study estimates.
Only about half have sought treatment, said the study released Thursday by the RAND Corporation.
"There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Terri Tanielian, the project's co-leader and a researcher at the nonprofit RAND.
"Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation," she said in an interview with The Associated Press.
To truly honor the troops, we must take care of them when they get home. Any soldier struggling with PTSD should not go back to Iraq and serve. The fact that Travis Twiggs kept getting sent back to do more tours of duty while he was suffering, is reprehensible. He was obviously struggling with the mental illness for a long period of time and needed treatment. He did not need to pile on his mental illness by experiencing more trauma in Iraq. This is just wrong and we need to do something about this epidemic. Once we end the war, we need to ensure that every soldier who served gets the best treatment possible for the rest of their life.
