Irag Troops Receives Shoddy Mental Health Care At Fort Drum

Can you imagine serving four tours of duty in Iraq yet having to wait for more than a month to receive psychological help? Well, that is exactly what is going on at Fort Drum:

According to a draft report, “Fort Drum: A Great Burden, Inadequate Assistance,” which was given to The New York Times last week, uncovered several problems with the mental health services on the post, which is north of Syracuse. Based on interviews with a dozen soldiers and the mental health providers on the base, the report describes problems with under staffing, a reliance on questionnaires to identify soldiers in need of treatment and a sometimes dismissive view at the company level of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, the commander of the 10th Mountain Division, which includes the Second Brigade, acknowledged the shortcomings of the mental health care on the base, and said the problems were being addressed. In particular, he said, the providers of psychological services on the base have been expanding their effort to interview “those who are most at risk,” though “the screening process is not where we want it to be.”

Indeed, the report said that the wait for an appointment has eased since three Army psychiatrists were reassigned last month from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, joining three psychiatrists already on the base, to address the needs of 3,500 Second Brigade soldiers recently back from Iraq. But, the report noted, the reassignment was “only a temporary fix” since the psychiatrists from Walter Reed would probably return to Washington in a few weeks.

Fort Drum lacks its own hospital, so any soldier needing inpatient treatment has to be sent to Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown, which recently increased the number of beds in its psychiatric unit to 32 from 24.

But the report said that when the psychological facilities at the base have closed for the day, some soldiers have bypassed Samaritan and driven more than an hour to Syracuse for treatment. The Veterans for America report said the soldiers fear that doctors at Samaritan will side with some base leaders, who had, “in some cases, cast doubt on the legitimacy of combat-related mental health wounds.”

Nor is the heavy service the only problem at Fort Drum. In the last two weeks, it has been at the center of a controversy over whether the Army instructed the Department of Veterans Affairs last March to stop helping soldiers there with their disability claims. At first, the Army surgeon general, Eric B. Schoomaker, denied that the Army had told Veterans Affairs to do so.

Fort Drum needs to be totally investigated because this is a shoddy way to treat soldiers who have given so much of themselves. Is it too much to ask that they receive the help they most desperately need?