After Combat, Victims of an Inner War

Sgt. Jacob Blaylock flipped on the video camera he had set up in a trailer at the Tallil military base, southeast of Baghdad.

He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward.

“Hey, it’s Jackie,” he said. “It’s the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

For almost a year, the soldiers of the 1451st Transportation Company had been escorting trucks full of gasoline, building materials and other supplies along Iraq’s dark, dangerous highways. There had been injuries, but no one had died.

Their luck evaporated less than two weeks before they were to return home, in the spring of 2007. A scout truck driving at the front of a convoy late at night hit a homemade bomb buried in the asphalt. Two soldiers, Sgt. Brandon Wallace and Sgt. Joshua Schmit, were killed.

The deaths stunned the unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard. The two men were popular and respected — “big personalities,” as one soldier put it. Sergeant Blaylock, who was close to both men, seemed especially shaken. Sometime earlier, feeling the strain of riding the gunner position in the exposed front truck, he had switched places with Sergeant Wallace, moving to a Humvee at the rear.

READ MORE @ NY TIMES

Preventing Another Camp Liberty

Midway through her 2004 deployment to Iraq's Anbar province, Navy psychologist Heidi Kraft was e-mailing her husband about her experiences, and the message somehow turned into verse. The poem became the basis for her memoir "Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital" -- lessons that she revisited last week following the shooting at a combat stress facility in Baghdad. Kraft, who left active duty after nine years in the Navy and now treats combat stress patients, spoke with Outlook's Rachel Dry about how the military handles mental health and why PTSD can be like a sprained ankle. Excerpts:

Last Monday, Sgt. John M. Russell allegedly walked into a combat stress facility at Camp Liberty in Baghdad and opened fire, killing five service members. What did you think when you heard about the shooting?

My heart sank. I was so terribly saddened to hear it. As a provider, I can understand how something like this might have happened. Certainly if someone expresses either suicidal or homicidal thoughts, that person is categorized as a psychiatric emergency and steps are taken to stabilize that person. Sometimes those thoughts are not expressed in a way that makes it very clear what you're dealing with, and sometimes there's nothing to be done.

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Psych Patients With Cost-Sharing Plans Use More Services

People whose insurance plans better share the burden of the cost for mental health services use these programs more than those whose plans pick up less of the bill, a new study says.

The findings were based on a study of Medicare patients, some of whose plans provided equal cost-sharing and others whose plans put a greater cost burden on the patients. The patients in the study had recently received psychiatric discharges from facilities.

The study was published in the Dec. 24/31 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association.

U.S. health insurers have historically imposed higher out-of-pocket costs and greater restrictions for the use of mental health services than other medical illnesses.

READ MORE @ WASHINGTON POST