Huffington Magazine Issue 64-65 | Page 50

HUFFINGTON 09.01-08.13 COURTESY OF ANDREW O’BRIEN INVISIBLE CASUALTIES bat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even those troops who never experienced direct combat, researchers are realizing, are nonetheless experiencing the consequences of the damage war can inflict. The study by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center found that for all the military personnel medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2012, the most frequent diagnosis was not physical battle wounds but “adjustment reaction,” a category that includes grief, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and other mental disorders. “We start off with a very healthy population,” said Army Col. William Corr, a physician with the center. “Stress does cause people to become ill.” In considering the mental toll of war, “we usually think about infantrymen, guys shooting other people, but we are also seeing some problems among non-combatants,” said Craig Bryan, a clinical psychiatrist and suicide expert at the University of Utah, where he is associate director of the National Center for Veterans Studies. Bryan has led numerous research projects on mil- For 25-year-old Andrew O’Brien... it was the sight of remains of American bodies, after a convoy had struck an IED, that burned into his memory and caused nightmares that eventually drove him to attempt suicide. itary suicide and has served on active duty, deploying to Iraq in 2009 to treat troops for traumatic brain injury and combat stress. He cited the experiences of Air Force personnel who receive and process the war dead at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. War trau- ★