The Vets Are Alright (The Rest of Us Are the Problem)

This post is cross posted over at the wonderful Gunpowder & Lead blog. They're the same post.

As I read through recent stories about military veterans one thing has crystallized for me: the relentless focus on injuries, PTSD, TBI and the soldier's and veteran's general distress.

Based solely on the media's portrayal of returning soldiers and veterans one would believe them all to be fragile individuals whose lives may shatter at the slightest additional trauma. However, the vast majority of soldiers return healthy and capable, even if they are forever changed by their experience serving. That is to say, we seem to live in a world where the afflictions of soldiers are covered in the media like airplane crashes, rather than car accidents:

Page-one coverage of airplane accidents was sixty times greater than reporting on HIV/AIDs; fifteen hundred times greater than auto hazards; and six thousand times greater than cancer, the second leading killer in America after heart disease.

To be sure, PTSD, TBI, amputations, automobile accidents, plane crashes, and cancer deaths are all very real and very tragic but it's long past due that we consider the consequences of our relentless focus on the those afflicted by war because they are real as well.

While the media's predilection for rare and extraordinary stories has been well documented what's more important than the coverage itself is the nature of the coverage. For example: this October 2010 Washington Post article, Traumatic brain injury leaves an often-invisible, life-altering wound. This article is typical for its genre, coming in at nearly 3,000 words, yet devoting only a few sentences to any sort of wider context. We are told the raw number of diagnoses of TBI since 2000, then given another, larger, number from a RAND corporation study. Completely missing is any sense of scale. Do those 180,000 (or is it 300,000?) soldiers represent 1%, 10%, or 90% of individuals at-risk for TBI?

Misdirection by euphemism

As I watched the news a few weeks ago waiting to see if, and then when, the state of Georgia would execute Troy Davis—a man wrongly convicted at worst, or unjustly sentenced at best—something about the images from outside the prison struck me: The innocuous and anodyne name of the prison, the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.

Naming the prison this way asserts that the public should know that this facility is where diagnosing and classifying occur. While it's undeniably true that those terms do accurately convey some of the actions that the Georgia Department of Corrections carries out there, it begs the question: Why are these functions of this prison so vital as to claim space in its very name?

George Orwell, in his famous 1946 essay Politics and the English Language said, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." It is a coincidence of history that only a year later the United States would consolidate the belligerently named Departments of War and Navy into the comparatively docile Department of Defense.

The labels a culture applies to its institutions serve a purpose beyond mere identification: they signal the purpose and expectations by which we should judge them. This is why those two superfluous words in the Georgia prison's name are so important. They were not chosen lightly, nor were they included in the prison's title carelessly.

Let's examine the word diagnostic closely (classification's particulars ought to be self evident afterward). Beyond its definition, the verb diagnose is notable because it is overwhelmingly used to indicates a label applied by an authority. To wit: the OED's first usage example for diagnose is, "doctors diagnosed a rare and fatal liver disease." One can easily construct other common usages, e.g., "the mechanic diagnosed the problem with the car."

No matter the usage example, they all refer to situations where higher-information individuals (or professions, or institutions) apply a label to something. To put it more simply, diagnosis is an act of profound authoritarianism. While the authoritarian implications of both diagnosis and classification are important, the more subtle endorsement is toward the medical usage. It is no accident that diagnose's usage example invokes the medical profession.

Hospitals are not like airports; patients are not like airplanes

In writing blog posts that are critical of other writing one of my goals is not to point to the specific flaws of any particular article. No one has time to discredit all of the specious and nonsensical things that get posted, even by reputable outlets, to the internet each day. One of the things I try, and you can let me know if I'm failing, is to point out some of the tricks used to manipulate and/or mislead readers.

Which brings me to the false dichotomies. For an excellent example there's this piece in the Washington Monthly. You don't even have to read past the subhead to find the comparison:

Last year there wasn’t a single fatal airline accident in the developed world. So why is the U.S. health care system still accidentally killing hundreds of thousands? The answer is a lack of transparency.

I've added emphasis on a particularly important part here, and I'll get back to it in a bit.

How problems in WTUs are like drug interaction deaths

Medical issues in the military seem to be getting a lot of press attention these days, so I feel it's important to take a look at the genesis of these problems, specifically the polypharmacy issue and the troubles with Warrior Transition Units (WTUs). The policies leading to these problems have been well intentioned, yet there seems to be little thought or care for how and why they've gone so far astray, although there is plenty that they have gone astray.

Before delving into the issues I mentioned above, let's use a more well known example of these "second order effects." During the toughening of drug sentences in the late 1980s the Anti-Drug Abuse Act made prison sentences proportional to the quantity of illicit substance that a dealer was holding when arrested. The thinking behind such laws is straightforward: stiffer sentences for bigger time drug dealers. At first blush this sounds like a solid enforcement strategy; however, both in theory and in practice these laws had the unintended consequence of incentivizing dealers to hold smaller quantities while still being able to meet demand. Dealers responded to this by placing a new premium on purity. If they could sell their customers half the weight for the same price, they faced a lighter sentence if/when they were arrested. In this way drug laws that were designed to curtail large scale drug dealing had the perverse effect of increasing drug purity, which itself has many second order consequences (higher overdose rates, increased addiction potential, etc).

Breaking down the Army's suicide data

Part I: What does the data say?

There's a lot of grist to Wednesday's news briefing with Gen. Chiarelli on the 2010 Army suicide statistics. As usual, everything I write is my own opinion, unvarnished.

Looking past the headlines telling you some suicides were up and some where down I want to point out an underemphasized point that Gen. Chiarelli made during his briefing:

So the numbers [...] have really only focused on this group, both the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard, to collect this data for about five years.