INVISIBLE CASUALTIES
DR. CRAIG BRYAN
It’s ok
to change
F
OUR YEARS AGO this month I returned from Iraq, which was sort of
my last big mission as a military psychologist before “becoming a civilian.” As a psychologist I was interested in trauma and suicide long before
my deployment, but there’s something very different about listening to
a soldier tell the story of his buddy’s
death while he’s still lying in a hospital bed having fragments of metal
removed from his leg as compared to
hearing the same story in your clinic
in the U.S. two years after the fact. It
was also in Iraq that I first stood over
the body of someone who had died