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-
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