RADIO TIDBITS

I caught a little of Roy Masters show, Advice Line, last night and I found another trait he shares with wingnuts. Roy was talking about helping returning veterans who have PTSD and said they should not go to psychologists or psychiatrists for help because the professionals are Marxists or Communists! He did say that they don't realize it, it's just the way they've been trained.

Masters went on to claim that 150,000 Vietnam vets have committed suicide and that appears to be a wildly inflated number. This journal article has a much lower number:

On the basis of projections from two population-based mortality studies, the authors estimate that fewer than 9,000 suicides occurred among all Vietnam veterans from the time of discharge through the early 1980s. The sixfold or greater relative risk of suicide implied by the unsubstantiated suicide death tolls is also demonstrated to be incompatible with the findings of epidemiologic studies of mortality risk among Vietnam veterans.

A more recent study found only 43 Vietnam era veteran suicides from 1986-1994.