Tag: PTSD

30% of Veterans Suffer From PTSD. Science Says Yoga Will Help Them Heal

Posted on by robbie

Brianna Renner had just given birth to her second daughter when she felt herself slipping into postpartum depression. Renner, who served in the Marines Corps for five years, was accustomed to serious life challenges, but her colicky infant’s nonstop tears left her feeling hopeless and alone.
So she turned to the mat — her yoga mat, to be precise — and then things turned around. Renner rediscovered her mojo.
“When I practiced yoga, it was the only time that I could actually be Brianna. I wasn’t a mom, I wasn’t a wife, I was just me on the mat,” Renner said. “And that was kind of beautiful and amazing.”
Renner felt that she’d stumbled across something that could profoundly change the lives of people — specifically, her fellow service members — who had been through serious trauma, both physical and mental.
So Renner googled “veterans” and “yoga” and found the Veterans Yoga Project. Intrigued, she read on and saw that the organization was hosting a trauma-yoga training in Arlington, Virginia. A couple of weeks later, Renner made the drive from her home in New Hampshire. “I drank the Kool-Aid,” she said, laughing. “Afterward, I talked to the executive director and told him, ‘I’m in, I’m sold. What can I do to help out?’”
That was in 2014. Now Renner, who teaches yoga at a Veterans Affairs facility in White River Junction, Vermont, is Veterans Yoga Project’s director of programs. In that role, Renner manages all of VYP’s trainings, including their 15-hour free-for-veterans Mindful Resilience for Trauma Recovery training — one of which helped turn Matthew Adams’ life around.
Adams served in the military for eight years. While in Iraq, an explosion threw him from a vehicle, leaving him with permanent physical problems. Upon discharge, he found himself in a dark place and subsequently “lost a couple of years in a bottle,” he told News Center Maine. Adams struggled with symptoms of PTSD before finding the mindfulness training program organized by VYP in Bangor, Maine. After his initial reluctance, Adams decided to attend, and he now credits the program, and yoga in general, with changing his life. 
“It really brought down the amount of pain I experienced in my back, it really calmed me down, helped me focus my mind and gain more control over my breathing,” he said.   
As a sufferer of PTSD, Adams is hardly alone. As many as 30% of former U.S. service members live with the crippling disorder. What’s more, roughly 20 veterans die by suicide every single day. And of those who have been diagnosed with PTSD — the symptoms of which include anxiety, depression, insomnia, uncontrollable anger and issues with addiction — only about half will ever seek treatment through the VA.  
Renner emphasized that yoga is not intended to replace other forms of treatment for PTSD, which typically include a combination of medication and exposure-based talk therapy. “Our program was designed specifically to be a part of a complementary practice, if you will, to therapy that may already be in place,” she said. “We work with yoga teachers and health clinicians to bring tools of mindful resilience to veterans and to their community.”
So why yoga? Why not rugby or pole-vaulting or anything else that requires exertion and concentration? 
It has to do with how the body engages the brain during the practice of yoga, according to Daniel J. Libby, a Yale-trained clinical psychologist and a founder and executive director of VYP. 
“All traumatic events are defined by a lack of safety, predictability and control,” Libby said. “For someone who develops post-traumatic stress that perpetuates, the world continues to feel unsafe, unpredictable and uncontrollable, and my own mind and body are also unsafe, uncontrollable and unpredictable. As PTSD is a psycho-physiological condition, it only makes sense that a body-mind approach [like yoga] would be helpful.”

sunset yoga
Veterans honored Independence Day with a sunset yoga class in New York City on July 4, 2019.

FROM BATTLE TO BUDDHA

It makes sense that yoga can increase flexibility and resilience. But on the face of it, active wartime combat and sun salutations hardly seem simpatico. Part of it is yoga’s image problem, Renner said. 
“There is a huge stigma around the word ‘yoga,’ and I can remember 20 years ago when I went to my first class, I fell right into that stigma,” she said. “I’m like, this is not for me. I’m a badass Marine, I’m not doing yoga!” But it soon became clear to her that there was much more to the practice than nice leggings and Instagram-worthy visits to exotic ashrams. “You can still be a badass in uniform and have balance in your life. You don’t have to be super-hardcore all the time, because you can’t live in that place of hardcore-ness all the time.” 
In 2018 alone, VYP documented more than 20,000 visits by veterans, said Renner (classes are always free for veterans; some are open to their spouses and children, too). Currently, VYP has over 120 national volunteers who chip in to teach yoga and help run the organization. In addition, VYP hosts an annual Veterans Gratitude Week, where thousands of civilians and veterans come together in studios across the country to practice yoga “with an attitude of gratitude for our service members,” Libby said. All proceeds benefit VYP (this year’s event will take place from Nov. 8–18). 
Despite the increasing numbers of vets taking up yoga, some people argue that those who practice it are a self-selecting group. In other words, a veteran who elects to take a yoga class might already be open to the kind of change a regular yoga practice can engender. Dianne Groll, an associate professor and research director at Queen’s University’s Department of Psychiatry in Ontario, is one of them. “Who does [yoga] work for, and for how long?” she said. “It works really well for the people who like it, and are well enough to do it.”
Groll, whose husband is in the Canadian Armed Forces, co-authored a 2016 paper that examined the impact of a 12-week yoga program on members of the Canadian military who self-identified as having experienced at least one traumatic event while serving. The results for this group showed statistically significant improvements in their levels of anger, anxiety, pain and quality of sleep compared to those who did not participate in the program. Moreover, individuals “who met the PTSD screening criteria showed significantly greater improvement than those who did not.” 
Groll added that there were significant obstacles in conducting the study — people with PTSD sometimes find it difficult to commit to a regularly scheduled class, and about 20% of the participants had dropped out before the three-month study concluded. But as Groll pointed out, the bar to entry for yoga is low, so why not give it a shot? 
“Yoga is relatively cheap. It can be done pretty much anywhere, and a lot of people seem to benefit from it,” Groll said. “And there was a significant increase in people’s mood and a decrease in anxiety [among vets who participated in the study], so we should find out why people quit practicing yoga and encourage them to keep going.”

PSEUDOSCIENCE … OR NEUROSCIENCE?

Deb Jeannette teaches yoga at a VA Medical Center on Long Island. Her son spent 11 years in the Marines, part of it on deployment to Afghanistan as a helicopter pilot. “I was constantly having to worry about his safety, and dealing with that trauma of being in a situation where there was no control,” she said. Then she found the Veterans Yoga Project. Despite a lack of control over her son’s well-being, she realized, “I also had my yoga. I could roll out my mat. I could do the breaths. I could do the work. I could do the meditation. I could remember to live moment by moment, because that’s all we have.”
Jeannette is now president of VYP’s board of directors, as well as New York’s regional director. Jeannette said that VYP teachers track statistical improvements in participants via something called a SUDS sheet, which stands for Subjective Units of Distress Scale. She said that of the vets who attended a VYP class in 2018, 80% to 90% experienced a reduction in stress. “And that’s without drugs,” Jeannette added.  
The science backs her up. Emily Hawken is a postdoctoral neuroscience fellow at Queen’s University who has spent the past six years investigating the effects of “things you do to your body as it pertains to the cellular and molecular structure of the brain.” When it comes to trauma, the prevailing theory is that the body falls “out of homeostasis,” which produces all of the symptoms associated with PTSD. A “learned” controlled breathing, like the kind that undergirds yoga, changes the heart rate and modulates the vagus nerve, which collects info from all of our organs and peripheral nervous system and feeds it back into our brains. This increases heart rate variability and modulates some key neurotransmitters in the brain, specifically GABA, which researchers suspect boosts mood and has a calming effect on the nervous system. In other words, controlled breathing “keeps things quiet” in the brain. 
“It’s mostly the breathwork that is the real driver of any sort of impact [from practicing yoga] we are going to see in the brain — at least, that’s the hypothesis,” Hawken said. “But there’s evidence to support it.”
For VYP founder Libby, proof of yoga’s significant impact on reducing PTSD symptoms is made real by every veteran who completes a yoga course. “I hear so many stories about veterans who are turning their lives around,” Libby said. “Veterans telling us that they leave class in less pain than when they arrived; that they leave class with less stress than when they arrived. And that they are finding meaning and purpose and a life worth living.”
More: This Inspiring Former Inmate Teaches Yoga In An Unlikely Spot
 

Emotional Support Animals Are Not Service Animals. Here’s Why It Matters

Posted on by robbie

It’s Monday in the office, and I’m on a mission to see if the mouse that continues to eat its way through my pantry can be registered as an emotional support animal. After all, it has been more effective in cutting carbs from my diet than weekly therapy.
Within five minutes of searching online, I found that if I paid $164 to one company, it would provide me with a “disability assessment and treatment recommendation letter.” This letter would allow me to position the mouse — yes, my pest — as an emotional support animal. For another $75, I could get a letter that would make it possible for me to take the tiny rodent with me on a plane for a year, no questions asked.
It’s schemes like these, along with a number of viral-worthy posts claiming peacocks and iguanas as emotional support animals, that have made the use of emotional support animals (ESAs), well, eyebrow-raising.
As a result, people who game the system to get free flights for their pets are being scrutinized more frequently — and that’s not good news for those with actual disabilities.
“I had to fight for my right to have my ESA everywhere I applied for housing. It was extremely difficult dealing with housing managers who simply had been scammed so many times,” Karen Ann Young, a blind woman with PTSD who has been using a seeing eye dog along with her ESA for 33 years, tells NationSwell. “It took so long to find an apartment [because] landlords have been overrun with tenants claiming their pets are emotional support animals.”
Here are a few things you need to know about service animals, the controversy surrounding ESAs, and what’s being done to stem the rising tide of fraudulent support and service animals.

What is an ESA?

In order for an animal to be considered “of service,” the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the animal to be trained to provide a specific task — seeing eye dogs, for example.
By law, most public places are required to allow service animals. Shop owners are allowed to ask someone using a service animal two questions: “Is the animal required because of a disability?” and “What has the animal been trained to do?”
It’s a completely different set of requirements, though, for ESAs, which are regulated under the Fair Housing Act and Air Carrier Access Act. Typically, you must have a legitimate mental diagnosis and an ESA deemed necessary by a licensed psychotherapist, before your pet can fly for free (and not in the cargo hold).
But those seemingly legitimate rules have created a cottage industry for online certifications, bogus treatment letters and even online shops via Amazon that sell support animal gear.
As a result, pigs can fly. And that’s a growing problem.

Service Animal 1
Many veterans find relief from PTSD through emotional support dogs, but there’s no conclusive evidence that animals effectively treat the disorder.

How ESAs turned airline travel into a nuisance

In January this year, Dexter the peacock made its owner famous after she was denied entry to her flight from Newark to Los Angeles when she claimed the bird was an ESA. And earlier this month, Southwest Airlines announced they would start allowing miniature horses on planes. (Miniature horses are recognized as service animals under the ADA.)
But many are saying “neigh” to the idea of expanding the definition of support in this context, partially because it’s feared that the ESA trend is getting out of control.
It’s difficult to know how many ESAs there are in the nation — there is no central database or oversight in terms of how such animals are registered — but airlines track the number of support animals they fly every year, which gives us some idea. Delta Airlines found that since 2015, it has flown over 250,000 service and support animals — an increase of 150 percent.
Another study found that registration for assistance dogs in California increased by 1,000 percent between 2002 and 2012. And that number is likely to rise, as Americans age and start requiring more canine support.  
“It is likely we will see more dramatic increases in the number of adults with a disability as the baby boomer population [ages] over the next 20 years,” Chad Helmick with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Anything Pawsible, a trade publication covering service animals.

Are ESAs effective?

One in five Americans deal with mental illness in a given year, and given the massive media pick up on animals helping us deal with trauma or stress, you’d think that a small furry creature — such as a hungry mouse — could represent cheap and easy therapy.
Not so much, it seems.
The science is still out on ESAs being truly effective for treating those with trauma, depression or anxiety.
Dogs, for example, have been found to help veterans with PTSD. Adopting furry animals has shown to help reduce stockbrokers’ blood pressure, and a review published this past February found that pets did, indeed, help those with mental health conditions.
But almost all of the studies that demonstrate the efficacy of pet therapy also come with a big caveat: there needs to be more research on the subject. Moreover, there is nothing conclusive to show that animals actually help more than just being cute, cuddly and generally happiness inducing.
“Despite media headlines extolling the curative powers of dolphins, dogs, horses and Guinea pigs, there is little evidence of the long-term effectiveness of emotional support animals for the treatment of mental problems,” writes Hal Herzog, a psychologist who analyzes relationships between humans and animals, for Psychology Today. “Indeed, it is possible that they can sometimes have an enabling function which actually prolongs an individual’s psychological issues.”

Airlines and states are fighting back

Because airlines are on the front lines of the ESA debate, private companies like Delta Airlines and JetBlue have created higher standards for flying with animals, such as providing proof of need through a therapist’s note and giving 48 hours notice to review animals being taken on board.
The change in policy — outside the dramatic increase in ESAs being used in travel — was implemented because of “incidents involving emotional support animals that haven’t been adequately trained to behave in a busy airport or the confined space of an aircraft,” reads JetBlue’s policy.
But states have also taken action in order to curb the trend.
Last year, the state of Washington passed a law that makes misrepresenting a pet as a service animal a civil infraction with a $500 fine. A similar law was passed in Arizona this year that also fines fraudulent service animals’ owners.
But such laws can create problems for people who rely on legitimate service animals. Some argue that the new legislation doesn’t adequately address poorly behaved non-disabled people and their pets, but rather opens up harassment for people who actually depend on their animals to help them lead normal lives.  
Perhaps a better solution is one that is less punitive than regulatory, like a nationally recognized identification system, where both dogs and trainers must pass testing and be recertified every few years — something not currently mandated under the ADA.
And though I might want to justify my use of an ESA mouse to cut back on my intake of Wonder Bread, I think it’s likely best to just stick with traditional diet and exercise.

At This Prison, Puppies and Inmates Give Each Other Purpose

Posted on by robbie

At this women’s prison in upstate New York, puppies are proving to be more than just woman’s best friend.
“They make you feel like you’re worth something,” says Dunasha Payne, an inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. “And they make you wake up every day, that you have a purpose in life and that you’re not just a prisoner.”
Payne is part of Puppies Behind Bars, a program that teaches inmates to train puppies as service animals for veterans and first responders suffering from PTSD. Not only do the dogs bring comfort to the people they serve, but the inmates participating in the program are “the most well-behaved” in the prison, according to one guard. Watch the video above and read our full article to see how Puppies Behind Bars is making a difference for people in and out of prison.

These Dogs Are Giving Inmates a Paws-itive Path Forward

Posted on by robbie

Charlene Mess was having a bad dream. At least, she was acting like she was.
As she rocked back and forth, screaming and moaning, her dog, Champ, shot his head up and leapt into action. He pulled off Mess’ sheets and flicked on the room’s lights with his wet nose. It took him a few tries, but when he finally switched it on, there was thunderous applause.
Champ was demonstrating his latest trick in front of a room of dog trainers, who also happen to be inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for women in New York, about an hour north of Manhattan.
“Good boy!” Mess said, jumping up from her makeshift bed, which in reality was a long table, as she fed Champ treats from a kibble pouch that she had belted over her prison uniform.
The flipping-on-the-light trick was just one of many that Champ showed off during a recent class at Bedford Hills, where he and Mess participate in Puppies Behind Bars (PBB). The New York–based nonprofit, which operates in six correctional facilities and works with about 140 prisoners, trains inmates to raise service dogs for wounded veterans and first-responders suffering from trauma-related disorders. They also raise and train explosive-detection canines (EDCs) for law enforcement.
The benefits of the program are circular: Not only do the dogs go on to serve those who need help, they also positively impact the inmates who raise them from 8-week-old puppies, providing them with a sense of purpose and redemption. According to PBB, many of the puppy-raisers go on to work professionally as dog trainers and groomers after they’re paroled.
“Craig makes me feel whole,” says Dunasha Payne, fighting back tears as she speaks about her 2-year-old black lab, which is expected to graduate from PPB and start life as a service dog within the next few weeks. “And I love him so much, and it’s like, I tried my best with my dog, and I put all my personal feeling aside to raise him to the fullest potential that I could. But they make you feel like you’re worth something, and they make you [feel] that you have a purpose in life, and that you’re not just a prisoner, that you’re not just here to do some time.”

A NEED FOR SUPPORT

In 1997, the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility became the first prison in New York to implement Puppies Behind Bars. The program, which is funded through outside donations, initially focused on raising and training seeing-eye dogs. But then came 9/11 and the subsequent conflicts in the Middle East.
“Being a New Yorker, living in New York, being there on September 11th, I’ve always thought that those first responders were thanked and thanked and thanked initially, and then they kind of weren’t,” says PPB founder and president Gloria Gilbert Stoga, who once worked on a commission to find employment for low-income New Yorkers under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. “They kind of blended into the background, [but they] had a lot of health issues.”
It was at that point that Stoga widened PPB’s mission to include the training and deployment of explosive-detection canines and, later, service dogs for traumatized first responders and wounded veterans.
“With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raging, I kept thinking, ‘What can I do? What can I do?’” she says. “The answer was that I can help these [inmates] raise service dogs that we can donate to wounded war veterans.”

Puppies Behind Bars 2
Gloria Gilbert Stoga started Puppies Behind Bars in 1997. Today, the nonprofit provides service animals to veterans and first responders while giving purpose to people serving prison sentences.

Along with a handful of other instructors, including former inmates who have gone on to work for PPB, Stoga teaches prisoners how to raise service dogs. She also conducts several group training sessions a year, in which veterans are paired with dogs and learn from the inmate-trainers how to work with them. The program puts 2-month-old puppies, most of which are labrador retrievers, under the watchful eyes of inmates. These devoted doggy caretakers live, sleep and work with the pooches 24/7 until they’ve mastered an industry-standard 85 commands, like opening doors for wheelchair users, plus five more that specifically help sufferers of PTSD and TBI (traumatic brain injury).
Most dogs are able to complete the training program in 12 to 24 months. To date, PBB has put more than 250 to use as guide, service, therapy and companion dogs, plus another 437 have gone on to work with law enforcement as bomb-sniffing dogs.
Though the Department of Correction does not track recidivism rates of parolees who have participated in PBB, a DOC spokesperson says it measures success in the soft skills gained by inmates who care for the dogs.
“Part of [DOC’s] mission is to prepare individuals for their transition back to the community,” the spokesperson says. “[Puppies Behind Bars] incentivizes good behavior in the facility, as well as giving individuals the opportunity to do something positive for someone else, while learning patience, pride and accomplishment — all of which will benefit them when they reenter society.”

‘WE MANUFACTURE BEST FRIENDS’

The walk through Bedford Hills Correctional Facility — the only maximum-security prison for women in the state — is brimming with reminders of exactly where you are. There may be a few pretty flowers here and there, sure, but it’s all against a backdrop of barbed wire and high fences.
“I’ve been here for years,” says a prison security guard. “And let me tell you, this is like no other program. It really works. They are the most well-behaved inmates.”
It’s 8:30 in the morning, and Payne is on a turfed field playing fetch with her dog, Craig.
Payne has changed her life around since entering prison in 2013. Originally from Queens, she was well-known in local tabloids as “hell on wheels” after mowing down and killing her ex-boyfriend in a jealous rage.
She says that everything is different now. She has been part of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, an in-prison arts program that has been shown to dramatically reduce recidivism rates, and is now a trainer with Puppies Behind Bars, which — according to the organization’s mission statement — aims to help those living in prison learn to sacrifice for a bigger cause. Another perk is that inmates who take part in the program can shave six months off their sentence.
“I’ve had Craig since he was 8 weeks old. I also have a child at home who is 8 years old, and I left her when she was 3,” says Payne. “And not to compare the two, but for me, I really got my confidence in proving to [the PBB staff] that I can indeed take care of a dog. I felt that my purpose was way more important than just me being a regular average inmate.”
Other inmates say the program has fostered in them a passion for helping others. When a first responder was paired with the dog Alice Trappler had raised, she saw it as an opportunity to help a man fighting deep depression.
“He shared with us that he felt broken. He didn’t feel at all like he was worthwhile. And he had tried to commit suicide, which to me is heartbreaking,” says Trappler, who’s serving a 25-year-to-life sentence. “My comment to him was that his dog did not think he was broken. She thought he was great, and she thought he was the best thing ever.
“We manufacture best friends, because they’re infallible and they love you no matter what.”

My New Mission: Saving Vets Who Can’t Save Themselves

Posted on by robbie

I wish I could’ve saved my soldiers.
I was 22 years old when I became a platoon leader overseeing and taking care of 40 soldiers in combat in 2010. At the time, I had only done one tour — 12 months — in Iraq. But many of my soldiers had served four or five tours and had seen much more than I had.
Our job was to drive up and down the International Highway, which connected Kuwait to Iraq, and build relationships with local Iraqi police and sheiks. But we also had to check for improvised explosives, or IEDs.
We didn’t get all of them. In one case, before heading out on a mission, a U.S. envoy truck came careening into our base, half blown to hell and torn to shreds. In the back: three dead bodies. We had missed an IED.
There’s a lot of guilt in seeing something like that, and it can lead to a major symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder called survivor’s remorse. There is a wear on the brain and the body that goes into being in the military, especially for those deployed.
But were you ever to suggest talking to a therapist, you’d be hard-pressed to find many service members who would take you up on it. In the military, getting mental health treatment is viewed as a weakness — which, besides the negative stigma, is just plain wrong. There were soldiers who’d give therapy a try, only to leave after a single session and say, “I don’t feel better. I need to get back to the unit. I need to help out. This is an hour out of my time when I could be spending that with my family.”
And within a few years, there were people in my unit who had attempted suicide. It’s been seven years since I left Iraq, and in that time we’ve lost two people who were in my unit, one of whom I directly oversaw.
As a platoon leader, I viewed it as my responsibility to take care of our soldiers beyond getting the mission done. But with the news of the suicides came a sense that I had failed as their leader. It was my responsibility to take care of these guys, just like they took care of us.
After I retired from the military in 2015, I went to business school in Philadelphia. It had become my mission to find out how I could make our soldiers know that therapy could actually work for them, if only they would stick with it. Just as you wouldn’t return to your normal, daily routine after breaking an arm and undergoing one session with a physical therapist, neither should you expect to be fully recuperated after one session with a mental health professional.

Chris Molaro (left) served in Iraq as a liaison to local police and sheiks.

But, I soon realized, to get soldiers into therapy and keep them there, they needed to see — physically, with their own eyes — the progress they were making.
I read up on research that showed how you can use EEG technology, which measures electrical activity in the brain, to also measure one’s emotions. That was when a light bulb just went off, like, “Holy shit, you could make mental health as black and white as a broken arm.”
That meant therapists could measure and track the progress of patients, objectively. And by doing so, they could fight that negative stigma and give people more hope.
So I developed NeuroFlow. The idea is simple: Give therapists a technology that uses basic and affordable medical supplies, like EEGs or heart rate monitors, to examine the health of their clients. That way, patients could see how their heart races — literally — in real time as they talk about something traumatic. And then, over the course of their sessions, they would be able to see their heart rate slow down and return to a more relaxed state as they healed.
This is my new mission: helping the veteran community. With 20 vets killing themselves in the U.S. every day, there is still a lot of work to be done. So I can’t quite say my mission is complete … yet.

—

As told to staff writer Joseph Darius Jaafari. This essay has been edited for style and clarity. Read more stories of service here.

For Many Female Vets, Healing From Trauma Starts With the Eyes

Posted on by robbie

When her Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2008, former Army Sgt. First Class Elana Duffy was tossed around the front seat like a football, which resulted in a brain injury. For years afterward, she couldn’t shake the raw, negative emotions that slowly ate away at her. It simply never occurred to her that the impact to her brain would eventually erode her mental well-being too.
“I realized that I was kinda angry, but I wasn’t acknowledging it,” Duffy, 37, says. “I just thought I was processing things differently.”
Until 2012, Duffy worked in military intelligence. As an interrogator in Iraq, she extracted information from her subjects — some of whom were directly responsible for the deaths of her fellow soldiers — and often had to befriend them. Doing so was emotionally challenging, and after her head injury the stress of it all soon engulfed her.
“Everything, I thought, was ultimately related to a physical problem, and I didn’t really want to confront it,” she says.
She’s not unique in this situation. A recent report concluded that nearly half of post-9/11 veterans aren’t accessing the mental care they need. And women, who make up about 15 percent of the active-duty force, are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at a higher rate than in previous conflicts. Current estimates put the number of female veterans experiencing some form of depression or anxiety at one-half to one-third. What’s more, another one in five report being the victims of military sexual trauma (MST).

Army Sgt. First Class Elana Duffy (left) and the Humvee she was in (right) when a roadside bomb went off, resulting in her brain injury.

There are a host of methods to treat such veterans, like cognitive processing therapy and exposure therapy. These psychotherapies, while medically sound, can require a patient be in treatment for months, if not years. Contrast that with the use of a technique called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, whose adherents say can rehabilitate combat veterans with PTSD in fewer sessions.
Duffy, who suffered from apoplexy, or cerebral hemorrhaging, was introduced to the practice at Headstrong, a treatment program in New York City dedicated to serving post-9/11 vets. Headstrong specializes in EMDR, which uses eye movements to alleviate the stress of a traumatic event. While closely tracking the rapid back-and-forth finger movements of a therapist (or other side-to-side stimulation), the patient holds in his or her mind the disturbing event and the negative memories associated with it.
No one knows exactly how EMDR works, but it seems to affect the way the brain processes information, including the source of a patient’s PTSD. After successful treatment, the patient can still recall the event, of course, but she’s able to recognize it in a less debilitating way.
The theory behind EMDR, which has been around since the late 1980s but only gained acceptance as a treatment for veterans in the past 15 years, comes from what we know about sleeping. During deep sleep, our eyes move quickly from left to right in a process called rapid eye movement. REM helps our brains metabolize information gathered throughout the day and lets go of whatever it doesn’t need.

Though the treatment has been widely supported by multiple studies, it’s not without criticism. A 2013 meta-analysis of prior EMDR studies, published in the journal Military Behavioral Health, concluded that it “[failed] to support the effectiveness of EMDR in treating PTSD in the military population.” The Department of Veterans Affairs — which, along with the Department of Defense, recommends the treatment — takes a more balanced approach, stating, “Although EMDR is an effective treatment for PTSD, there is disagreement about [if] it works. Some research shows that the back and forth movement is an important part of treatment, but other research shows the opposite.”
For Duffy, EMDR was the lifesaver she almost turned down.
“‘I don’t like psyches,’” she remembers saying of psychiatrists, after a clinician recommended she try EMDR at Headstrong. “I flat out told him, ‘I don’t trust them, I don’t like them. So I can’t promise you that I’m going to follow through with this.’”
But she did. And three years later, she swears by the clinic’s EMDR therapy in helping her manage her stress and anger.
Keeping all veterans, both women and men, in treatment is its own battle. A report by the RAND Institute found that the number of follow-up appointments given to veterans is insufficient to help manage PTSD, which leads many to give up on medical care altogether.
“The military sets up a therapy structure that’s so dysfunctional,” says Dr. Laurie Deckard, chief clinical officer for the all-female veteran treatment center 5Palms in Ormond Beach, Florida. She knows this firsthand: When she worked at Fort Stewart in Georgia, she routinely saw 10 service members in the morning alone, each getting only 20 minutes of therapy. “There is no way to do PTSD treatment in 20-minute sessions.”
But as more mental health professionals embrace EMDR for treating veterans, the calculation of how long it takes to rehabilitate them is changing.
Duffy, who once balked at the idea of psychotherapy, now says, “I don’t have to be a tough guy anymore. I don’t have to be this miserable.”
Editors’ note: Headstrong was co-founded by Zach Iscol, who is also a member of the NationSwell Council. This was brought to our attention after publication. Neither Headstrong nor the NationSwell Council paid for this article.
Correction: A previous version of this article identified Headstrong as a clinic. NationSwell apologizes for the error.

Tapping Immigrants to Become City Leaders, Using Design to Combat Street Pollution and More

Posted on by robbie

Nashville Is Training a New Generation of Leaders from Its Immigrant Communities, Citiscope
In 2009, a Nashville councilman proposed a ballot initiative to prevent bureaucrats from speaking anything but English. Voters defeated the nativist measure, and “Nashville has not looked back,” the former mayor says. Today, the Southern city picks leaders from immigrant communities and introduces them to various government institutions like the courts, schools and water treatment plants, in the hopes that some will one day run for local office.

Street Furniture that Helps Fight Pollution and Save Lives, Co.Design
Living near one of New York City’s ambulance stations could, paradoxically, be detrimental to your health. While parked, the emergency response vehicles leave their engine running nonstop to power their radios and refrigerate medicines, coughing out exhaust for hours. An energy startup has been tapped to place slender, metallic charging pedestals throughout the city, allowing ambulances to run their battery through an automatically retractable plug, while decreasing street pollution at the same time.

F.D.A. Agrees to New Trials for Ecstasy as Relief for PTSD Patients, The New York Times
For an average of 17 years each, a group of South Carolina patients — military veterans, rape survivors and emergency responders — had tried to get over their post-traumatic stress disorder. Neither prescription drugs nor psychotherapy worked. But the recreational drug MDMA, or Ecstasy, did. Now, a clinical trial of at least 230 patients will test whether the illegal party pill should be classified as a medical cure for the symptoms of trauma.

Helping Veterans Help Each Other

Posted on by robbie

In 2006, journalist Bob Woodruff had made the long trip to Taji, an hour north of Baghdad, to report on the Iraq war. Having recently been named co-anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” Woodruff’s life changed in an instant, when a roadside bomb struck his armored vehicle. The newsman was nearly killed, and after a long recovery, he eventually returned to journalism. He also started a foundation to help service members and their families. Overseen by NationSwell Council member Anne Marie Dougherty, the Bob Woodruff Foundation has raised more than $30 million to rehabilitate the injured, provide access to education and employment opportunities, and work to improve overall quality of life for veterans. NationSwell spoke with Dougherty about what veterans are facing as they return home from two Middle East wars.
How did Bob Woodruff’s brain injury shape the mission of his foundation?
After he was hurt in Iraq, he said, “We’re not special. People are suffering the same injuries, if not worse ones.” He was able to see firsthand the struggles of service members who come home injured. But Bob and his family were acutely aware that they had ABC News and [parent company] Disney to really make sure they were taken care of, in a way that’s maybe different from the resources a young enlisted soldier has.
In a weird way, the Woodruffs became this bridge across the military-civilian divide. They walk the walk. When Bob woke up from his coma and recovered, they could have quietly gone back to their lives. But they felt like they could use the extra attention surrounding their tragedy to raise money and awareness — and they don’t want any credit for it. That gives me energy, because it’s such an authentic commitment. It’s their way of expressing gratitude for his recovery.
As I understand it, the foundation’s mission is to help veterans recover from the war, both physically and spiritually. What does that look like to you, in the day-to-day?
We try to understand what’s going on in the active-duty military and veteran communities. We scan the landscape to identify what the policies are at the federal, state and local levels; what budgets are getting cut; what’s on the horizon with the next administration; and how all these pieces affect service members. Our role is to complement the resources the government provides. Once we know what’s needed, we go out and find organizations that have the relevant programs.

The Bob Woodruff Foundation supports the use of service dogs to help rehabilitate veterans.

Why does this work matter to you personally?
Shortly after Bob was injured, my husband was getting ready to deploy to Iraq as a marine. He didn’t end up going at that time, but we were staring down the barrel. After following the Woodruffs’ story, I had this thought in the back of my mind, “What if this happens to us?” I followed the thread through a marine wives’ network and was connected to the Woodruffs when they were literally running a kitchen-table operation. I was particularly interested in building the brand and its reputation. Instinctively, it seemed like there was an opportunity there.
There are roughly 40,000 veterans’ nonprofits out there. What do you look for when deciding which are worthy of funding?
A lot of what we think about is how to get outside the small ring of vets who are very proactive about joining programs. There’s a whole universe of veterans who are not taking advantage of the programs that exist. In a way, it’s like connecting supply with demand. After that, we take our due diligence seriously. When you’re running an organization with living namesakes, there’s a responsibility to create and uphold a certain standard. Getting a grant is a seal of approval. As the leader of the foundation, I have to set that standard every day, which is to be rigorous and consistent, transparent and accountable.
What’s one issue impacting service members that doesn’t get enough attention?
We were at war for the longest time in our nation’s history, but only 1 percent of the eligible population volunteered to serve. Because the wars weren’t being fought on American soil, there’s a huge disconnect, and frankly, people are kind of over it. That, combined with the current political climate, means the country isn’t able to focus attention — and therefore, resources — on what returning vets need. The health of our all-volunteer force depends on how we respond to veterans transitioning back into civilian society. If you can get out front of some of these very predictable issues, the trajectory can totally change. We’ve made huge progress — we are a very generous nation after all — but the risk is that we have compassion fatigue and short attention spans.
Is there a book you’d recommend to people who want to better understand the challenges vets face upon homecoming?
Sebastian Junger’s “Tribe” is an incredible explanation of something we intuitively already know to be true. When veterans come home — whether they’re injured or not — they struggle with a sense of purpose and meaning. In the military, it’s very clear what your role in the hierarchy is; you have your tribe. But eventually you wander back into regular life. You might miss being deployed. We need to understand that’s a human response and a very real sentiment.
How do you repair that feeling of disconnection?
Veterans helping other veterans. They’re drawn to service, and we’re creating opportunities for them to continue to serve. We know that by helping others like them, vets get healthier. They just want that human connection. Banks and other companies will say, “We’re gonna hire veterans; that’s how we’re going to solve veteran unemployment,” which is a very important piece of the puzzle. But there are a lot of people who join the military so that they don’t end up sitting in a cubicle at a big company. So we’ve taken on the challenge of finding opportunities, especially for service members who have been injured, that lets them work outside, doing something with their hands. There’s an organization called the Farmer Veteran Coalition, and it’s so simple: If you help a veteran afford a tractor, they can get a plot going. One of the grants from this group went to supplying a young farmer with mating turkeys. He calls it “dirt therapy,” just to be able to plant things and be alone in the peace and healing of the outdoors. On top of that, they’re growing organic food and participating in a farmers’ market to share this food with other people, and they’re attracting more veterans to come and work there. It’s having a multiplying effect.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Note: Since the publication of this article, Bob Woodruff Foundation has become a NationSwell advertiser.

The Power of Video Games to Heal America’s Heroes, A Surefire Way to Keep Students in School and More

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How Games Are Helping Veterans Recover from Injury, Polygon
U.S. Army Major Erik Johnson discovered the healing power of video games firsthand while recovering from a horrible car accident. Today, the occupational therapist serves as Chief Medical Officer for Operation Supply Drop, a nonprofit that taps the therapeutic benefits of technology to help veterans and active service members recover from physical injuries, mental struggles, memory and cognitive problems and more. Sure, it’s unconventional to put a Nintendo Wii controller in a soldier’s hand during therapy, but the results are undeniable: reestablishing “themselves as an able body person who can enjoy things they used to enjoy.”
What Can Stop Kids From Dropping Out? New York Times
The massive amount of outstanding student loan debt might not be the biggest problem when it comes to higher education. What is? The fact that almost half of college freshmen fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. Dropout rates are highest amongst minorities, first-generation undergrads and low-income individuals, but through advisory sessions at the first sign of trouble, classes that offer immediate feedback, tiny grants of just a few hundred dollars and more, George State University is helping these traditionally poor-performing students achieve higher graduation rates than their white peers.
The Bag Bill, The New Yorker
A self-described child of hippie parents, Jennie Romer fondly recalls visiting the local recycling facility with her parents. The weekly trips clearly had an impact on Romer, who’s spent much of her adulthood fighting for plastic bag bans. Success has been plentiful in California, with San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles all passing ordinances against the notorious environmental menace. Now Romer has her sights set on implementing a fee on plastic bags in the country’s largest metropolis. Will she add the Big Apple to her list of triumphs?
Editors’ note: Since the publication of the New Yorker article, the New York City Council has approved a 5-cent fee on plastic bags. 
MORE: The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War

The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War

Posted on by robbie

Jeremiah Montell, a Navy petty officer with 17 years of service, takes out his frustrations at his UFC gym. “He can knock the heck out of a boxing bag,” says Lynn Coffland, founder of Catch a Lift Fund, a nonprofit that funds a gym membership or home workout equipment for 2,500 post-9/11 veterans, including Montell. In the past year, Lynn witnessed as Montell lost 70 pounds, stopped taking medication and began crafting homemade American flags — all signs of healing.
Lynn has seen firsthand how physical activity and healing go hand in hand. Her brother Christopher J. Coffland, a fitness enthusiast always heading out to “catch a lift” — his term for hitting the gym — enlisted in the Army one month before he turned 42 years old. Dropping him off at the airport, Lynn asked through tears, “What do I do if you don’t come back?” After cracking a joke, Chris got serious, saying, “I probably won’t come back, but I’ve had a great run and I’m ready to meet Jesus. If I can put myself in the place of another man that has family back home, I will.” In 2009, two weeks after being deployed to Afghanistan, a roadside bomb killed Chris and injured two other Marines. As Lynn pondered how to memorialize her brother, messages from people who’d lifted weights with him in boot camp started flooding Lynn’s inbox.
“There was no program that the VA had set up yet for fitness,” Lynn remembers. “Every active-duty service-member has to be physically fit…Many men and women I talk to, they say [exercise is] their happiest memories. If they’re on base or out in another country, they work out. They have lots of laughs, a lot of friendship and bonding. They come home, and everything’s different. They don’t even know who they are anymore, they say. We get them back to that very basic core that they know existed, which was fitness.”
Catch a Lift Fund started by gifting gym memberships to three veterans in February 2010. The soldiers could pick any spot they wanted: 24-Hour Fitness or Crossfit, a place with pilates machines or a pool. Recovery and reintegration started almost immediately.
To find more participants, Lynn’s father wrote letters to every Veterans Administration hospital nationwide. Today, the group has a waiting list of more than 300 veterans. For those who find a gym stress-inducing, or those in rural areas, the fund pays for home systems.
“The culture has taught them that you have to push through,” but trauma “never goes away,” Lynn says. “You have to work on it so it stays at bay. Through fitness, through friendship and camaraderie, that’s how they’re healing.”