Iraq vets here seek help while psychic wounds are still fresh
By Carol Ann Alaimo
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.03.2008
"Daddy, why don't you play with us anymore?"
Iraq war veteran Rigo Morales was cut to the core by the question from his 4-year-old twin girls.
His wife had been asking questions, too, wondering what had become of the doting husband who used to leave her roses on the windshield and love notes on the fridge.
"I knew right away when he got back from the war that something was wrong with him," Angelica Morales, 30, said of her 34-year-old mate.
"He used to be so loving and attentive. After he got back, he was always tense. He looked scared.
"If we tried to go anywhere, the people and the noise would bother him so much that we'd have to leave. So we stopped going places."
Such cases are on the rise in Tucson and around the country. The Pentagon and the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System are reporting major spikes in stress illness among veterans who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The PTSD clinic at the local veterans hospital has seen its caseload soar by more than 100 percent. Last fiscal year, an average of 32 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans visited the clinic each month, compared with 73 a month so far this year.
Nationally, about 40,000 troops have been diagnosed with the disorder since 2003, The Associated Press has reported.
Rigo Morales is one of 150 or so Iraq and Afghanistan vets with once-crippling symptoms who have been treated in an intensive, three-week inpatient program at the Tucson VA hospital, one of three programs of its kind in the nation.
Troops are admitted to the hospital for education, counseling, peer support, and therapy for anger management and nightmare reduction.
They practice relaxation techniques and communication skills, receive medication for frayed nerves and sleeplessness, and learn how to rejoin a world that often doesn't make sense to them when they return from combat.
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