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    FDA Declines to Approve MDMA Therapy, and Seeks Further Study

    The agency said there was insufficient data to allow the use of a treatment for PTSD that involves the drug known as Ecstasy.The Food and Drug Administration on Friday declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, dealing a serious blow to the nascent field of psychedelic medicine and dashing the hopes of many Americans who are desperate for new treatments.The F.D.A. said there was insufficient data to allow its use, and it asked the company seeking approval for the treatment, Lykos Therapeutics, to conduct an additional clinical trial to assess whether the drug, commonly known as Ecstasy or molly, would be safe and effective.An additional clinical trial could add years, and millions of dollars, to the approval process.If approved, MDMA would have become the first psychedelic compound to be regulated by federal health authorities. Supporters of psychedelic medicine were deeply disappointed, and some said they were stunned, having assumed the therapy’s promising data would overcome flaws in the company’s clinical trials, which had been designed in consultation with F.D.A. scientists.“This is an earthquake for those in the field who thought F.D.A. approval would be a cinch,” said Michael Pollan, the best-selling author and co-founder of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. His book, “How to Change Your Mind,” helped catalyze public interest in the therapeutic potential of psychoactive compounds, demonized during the nation’s long war on drugs.But the agency’s decision had not been entirely unexpected, after a group of independent experts convened by the F.D.A. to evaluate Lykos’s data met in June and did not recommend the treatment. On two central questions, the experts voted overwhelmingly that the company had not proven the treatment was effective, and that the drug therapy’s benefits did not outweigh the risks.The agency generally follows the recommendations of its outside panels. Critics, however, have questioned the panel’s expertise, noting that only one of its 11 members had experience in psychedelic medicine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    FDA Panel Weights MDMA Therapy for PTSD

    An independent group of experts is meeting Tuesday to consider whether to allow use of this illegal drug, also known as Ecstasy, to treat PTSD. The Food and Drug Administration is weighing whether to approve the use of MDMA, also known as Ecstasy, for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. An independent advisory panel of experts will review studies on Tuesday and is expected to vote on whether the treatment would be effective and whether its benefits outweigh the risks.The panel will hear from Lykos Therapeutics, which has submitted evidence from clinical trials in an effort to obtain agency approval to sell the drug legally to treat people with a combination of MDMA and talk therapy.Millions of Americans suffer from PTSD, including military veterans who are at high risk of suicide. No new treatment for PTSD has been approved in more than 20 years.What is MDMA?Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is a synthetic psychoactive drug first developed by Merck in 1912. After being resynthesized in the mid-1970s by Alexander Shulgin, a psychedelic chemist in the Bay Area, MDMA gained popularity among therapists. Early research suggested significant therapeutic potential for a number of mental health conditions.MDMA is an entactogen, or empathogen, that fosters self-awareness, feelings of empathy and social connectedness. It is not a classic psychedelic like LSD or psilocybin, drugs that can cause altered realities and hallucinations. Among recreational users, MDMA is commonly known as molly or Ecstasy.In 1985, as the drug became a staple at dance clubs and raves, the Drug Enforcement Administration classified MDMA as a Schedule I substance, a drug defined as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    PTSD Has Surged Among College Students

    The prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among college students rose to 7.5 percent in 2022, more than double the rate five years earlier, researchers found.Post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses among college students more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, climbing most sharply as the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and upended young adults’ lives, according to new research published on Thursday.The prevalence of PTSD rose to 7.5 percent from 3.4 percent during that period, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed responses from more than 390,000 participants in the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey.“The magnitude of this rise is indeed shocking,” said Yusen Zhai, the paper’s lead author, who heads the community counseling clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His clinic had seen more young people struggling in the aftermath of traumatic events. So he expected an increase, but not such a large one.Dr. Zhai, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Studies, attributed the rise to “broader societal stressors” on college students, such as campus shootings, social unrest and the sudden loss of loved ones from the coronavirus.PTSD is a mental health disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and heightened sensitivity to reminders of an event, continuing more than a month after it occurs.It is a relatively common disorder, with an estimated 5 percent of adults in the United States experiencing it in any given year, according to the most recent epidemiological survey conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services. Lifetime prevalence is 8 percent in women and 4 percent in men, the survey found.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Army Sees Mortars as Safe. Troops Report Signs of Brain Injury.

    After firing about 10,000 mortar rounds during four years of training, one soldier who joined the Army with near-perfect scores on the military aptitude test was struggling to read or do basic math.Another soldier started having unexplained fits in which his internal sense of time would suddenly come unmoored, sending everything around him whirling in fast-forward.A third, Sgt. Michael Devaul, drove home from a day of mortar training in such a daze that he pulled into a driveway, only to realize that he was not at his house but at his parents’ house an hour away. He had no idea how he got there.“Guys are getting destroyed,” said Sergeant Devaul, who has fired mortars in the Missouri National Guard for more than 10 years. “Heads pounding, not being able to think straight or walk straight. You go to the medic. They say you are just dehydrated, drink water.”All three soldiers fired the 120-millimeter heavy mortar — a steel tube about the height of a man, used widely in training and combat, that unleashes enough explosive force to hurl a 31-pound bomb four miles. The heads of the soldiers who fire it are just inches from the blast.The military says that those blasts are not powerful enough to cause brain injuries. But soldiers say that the Army is not seeing the evidence sitting in its own hospital waiting rooms.In more than two dozen interviews, soldiers who served at different bases and in different eras said that over the course of firing thousands of mortar rounds in training, they developed symptoms that match those of traumatic brain injury, including headaches, insomnia, confusion, frayed memory, bad balance, racing hearts, paranoia, depression and random eruptions of rage or tears.Troops of the First Armored Division fire rounds from a carrier-mounted mortar during a training exercise in New Mexico in 2017.Killo Gibson/U.S. Army, via Department of DefenseThe military is confronting growing evidence that the blasts from firing weapons can cause brain injuries. So far, though, the Pentagon has identified a potential danger only in a few unusual circumstances, like firing powerful antitank weapons or an abnormally high number of artillery shells. The military still knows little about whether routine exposure to lower-strength blasts from more common weapons like mortars can cause similar injuries.Answering that question definitively would take a large-scale study that follows hundreds of soldiers for years, and it is impossible to draw sweeping conclusions from a handful of cases. But the soldiers interviewed by The New York Times have experienced problems similar enough to suggest a disturbing pattern.Most soldiers said they had fired at least 1,000 rounds a year in training, often in bursts of hundreds over a few days. When they were new at firing, they said, they felt no lasting effects. But with each subsequent training session, headaches, mental fogginess and nausea seemed to come on quicker and last longer. After years of firing, the soldiers experienced problems so severe that they interfered with daily life.Nearly all of the soldiers interviewed for this article never saw combat, but they were nonetheless haunted by nightmares, anxiety, panic attacks and other symptoms usually attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder. Nearly all sought medical help from the Army or the Department of Veterans Affairs and were screened for traumatic brain injury, but did not get a diagnosis. Instead, doctors treated individual symptoms, prescribing headache medicine, antidepressants and sleeping pills.That is in part because of how traumatic brain injuries, known as T.B.I.s, are diagnosed. There is no imaging scan or blood test that can detect the swarms of microscopic tears that repeated blast exposure can cause in a living brain. The damage can be seen only postmortem.So, doctors screening for T.B.I.s ask three questions: Did the patient experience an identifiable, physically traumatic event, like a roadside bomb blast or car crash? Did the patient get knocked unconscious, see stars or experience other altered state of consciousness at the time? And is the patient still experiencing symptoms?For a T.B.I. diagnosis, the answer has to be yes to all three.U.S. Army paratroopers fire a mortar barrage at a training area in Germany in 2022. Kevin Payne/Department of DefenseThe problem is that people who are repeatedly exposed to weapons blasts often cannot pinpoint a specific traumatic event or altered state of consciousness, according to Stuart W. Hoffman, who directs brain injury research for the V.A. With career mortar soldiers, he said, “if you’re not feeling the effects at the time, but you’re being repeatedly exposed to it, it would be difficult to diagnose that condition with today’s current standards.”That means injuries that seem obvious to soldiers go unrecorded in official records and become invisible to commanders and policymakers at the top. As a result, weapons design, training protocols and other key aspects of military readiness may fail to account for the physical limits of human brain tissue.An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick, said in a statement that for decades the Army has been studying how to make weapons safer to fire and is “committed to understanding how brain health is affected, and to implementing evidence-based risk mitigation and treatment.”Asked if the Army plans to phase out the use of the 120-millimeter mortar, a mobile weapon that nearly all infantry units use to rain down bombs on enemy positions, Colonel Lodewick said no.Still, there are signs that the Army sees problems with the mortar. It is developing a cone for the muzzle to deflect blast pressure away from soldiers’ heads. And in January, the Army issued an internal safety warning, drastically limiting the number of rounds that soldiers fire in training to no more than 33 rounds a day using the weakest charge, and no more than three rounds a day using the strongest.That warning, though, makes no mention of brain injury; the stated purpose is to protect troops’ hearing.The military measures the force of blast waves in pounds of pressure per square inch, and the current safety guidelines say that anything below 4 PSI is safe for the brain. The blast from firing a 120-millimeter mortar officially measures at 2.5 PSI. But the guidelines do not take account of whether a soldier is exposed to a single blast or to a thousand.There are roughly 9,000 mortar soldiers in the Army — and, in all service branches, there are thousands more troops who regularly use weapons that deliver a similar punch: artillery, rockets, tanks, heavy machine guns, even large-caliber sniper rifles.Justin Andes, 34, launched about 10,000 mortar rounds in Army training at Fort Johnson, La., between 2018 and 2021.He began to experience migraines, dizziness and confusion, to such a degree that his job of keeping accurate counts of weapons in his unit’s armory became a struggle. Eventually he had an emotional breakdown with thoughts of suicide, and he left the Army in dismay when his enlistment ended.Justin Andes launched about 10,000 mortar rounds in Army training at Fort Johnson, La., between 2018 and 2021.Chase Castor for The New York Times“We had to keep a count of every round we fired, and get the mortar tubes inspected each year, because all those blasts can take a toll on the weapons system,” he said in an interview. “But no one was doing that for us.”Mr. Andes joined the Army with a college degree and top scores on the military aptitude test. He had planned to get a graduate degree in political science, but after firing so many mortar rounds, he had trouble reading. Today, Mr. Andes, who now lives in Jefferson City, Mo., speaks with a slight slur, sometimes puts the milk in the kitchen cupboard instead of the refrigerator, and spends much of his time in his basement.“His voice is different, he acts different, he is a different person from the man I married,” his wife, Kristyn Andes, said. “I didn’t start to connect the dots that this might be mortars until some of the other wives said they were having the same issues.”The first sergeant in charge of Mr. Andes’ platoon, she said, was having trouble, too. He was forgetting words, struggling to remember his responsibilities and had a stammer in his speech and a tremor in his hand.Another soldier in his platoon, James Davis, 33, started having near-daily panic attacks in uniform, as well as balance problems, migraines and sensitivity to light. He went to a specialty clinic for traumatic brain injury at Fort Johnson in 2022. “I was told that with time, the symptoms would disappear,” said Mr. Davis, who now lives in Colorado Springs, in an interview. “I am still waiting for that to happen.”The 120-millimeter mortar is a widely used weapon among American combat troops. Marines fired mortar rounds in Afghanistan in 2017.Lucas Hopkins/U.S. Marines, via Department of DefenseMr. Andes, Mr. Davis and their first sergeant all left the Army without any official record that their brains may have been injured by mortar blasts. All three went to the V.A. for help. All three were found to be substantially disabled by issues that can be caused by traumatic brain injury, like vertigo, headaches, anxiety and sleep apnea. But not one was diagnosed with a brain injury.Former soldiers who fired mortars in the 1980s and 1990s say their experiences show that the problems are not new and may not improve with time.“It’s hard for me to piece together, because my memory has gotten so bad, but things are definitely getting worse,” said Jordan Merkel, 55, who joined the Army in 1987 and fired an estimated 10,000 mortar rounds over four years.In uniform, Mr. Merkel started experiencing strange fugue states, where he would be awake but barely responsive and would retain little memory afterward of what had happened.After the Army, he tried college but spent most of the time struggling through remedial classes. He married and divorced three times and said that he remembers very little about those relationships.For years he worked testing security software — a job with a predictable routine that allowed him to get by. But in 2016, he forgot how to do his work: Procedures he’d been following for years drew a blank.He was soon laid off, got a similar job and was laid off again. He has recently noticed trouble reading an analog clock.“I’m really concerned,” said Mr. Merkel, who now lives in Harrisburg, Pa. “This is not normal aging, this is something else.”He went to the V.A. this spring seeking help. The medical staff asked whether he had ever hit his head or been knocked unconscious, but they seemed dismissive when he brought up mortars, he said.“They weren’t the least bit interested in discussing anything related to blast concussion,” he said.Todd Strader had a similar experience. He fired mortars in the 1980s and 1990s at a U.S. base in Germany, and he developed headaches so severe that he would collapse on the ground and vomit. He was hospitalized in the Army for unexplained intestinal problems — a common issue among people with traumatic brain injuries. As a civilian, he struggled with fractured concentration, fatigue and anxiety.Todd Strader fired mortars in the 1980s and 1990s at a U.S. base in Germany. He developed headaches so severe that he would collapse on the ground and vomit.Matthew Callahan for The New York Times“I had plans for myself after the Army,” said Mr. Strader, 54, who now lives in Hampton, Va. “I wanted to travel the world but just ended up working a string of dead-end jobs.”He went to the V.A. in 2019 and was told that there was nothing in his record to suggest a military service-associated brain injury. Instead he was diagnosed with PTSD, even though he had never been in combat.Frustrated that the V.A. would not recognize what seemed obvious to him, he started a Facebook group, hoping to find other mortar soldiers with the same symptoms. The group now has nearly 2,500 members.The Pentagon has repeatedly assured Congress that the military is giving new attention to blast exposure, but ordinary soldiers say they have seen little change.Sergeant Devaul, who drove home to the wrong house, is now trying to get the Army to recognize that years of firing mortars injured his brain. He hasn’t had much luck.At his kitchen table in Kansas City, Mo., on a recent morning, he described how for 18 years he fired mortars, and how his life slowly fell apart.He started in the active-duty Army in 2006 and transferred to the National Guard in 2010. He deployed twice but never saw combat.After years of firing, he started to have trouble thinking. He had a civilian job doing carpentry but struggled with the math and organizational skills and left in frustration. He worked as a security guard for several years, but he developed headaches and concentration problems, and had outbursts of rage.Then he got a break from firing. For much of 2017 and 2018 he was in Qatar on a mission with no mortars and then in training away from the mortar range. He began feeling clearer and calmer. He studied to become an emergency medical technician and, in 2019, got a job with his local fire department.A slow-motion video provided by Sgt. Michael Devaul shows the training in 2021 that left him so dazed that he drove home to the wrong house.But that summer he resumed firing mortars. He started struggling to remember where supplies were kept in his ambulance. Other firefighters told him that he seemed to spend much of his time staring at nothing. The department asked him to learn to drive a fire truck, but he doubted that he could pass the test.In the fall of 2021 he was firing mortars in a training exercise and suddenly felt as though a seam had split in his head. He was dizzy and sick. For weeks afterward, he said, his skull was throbbing, and he was confused and angry.“I felt worthless and stupid,” he said. “I was so exhausted I could barely get off the couch. I didn’t see it getting better.”His wife filed for divorce. He became suicidal and spent five days in a program for PTSD.At his next National Guard training, it took only a few blasts to put him on the ground with the world spinning.The Guard now lists him as temporarily disabled by what it calls “post-concussion syndrome.” He is not allowed to fire mortars or even rifles.Since Sergeant Devaul can’t do his military job, the Guard has begun the process of discharging him. If it decides his injuries are service-related, he’ll be medically retired with lifetime benefits. If not, he’ll be forced out with next to nothing.Sergeant Devaul met recently with his brigade’s surgeon to be evaluated for traumatic brain injury. He said the doctor seemed skeptical that firing mortars could cause his symptoms.“I kept asking, ‘What else could have caused it?’ He didn’t have an answer,” he said. “I’ve got every single symptom of a traumatic brain injury. I just don’t have a diagnosis.” More

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    Traumatic Brain Injury Found in Maine Gunman Could Have Wide Ramifications

    Exposure to blasts, even at low levels, may play a much greater role in veterans’ mental health struggles than has been known, with implications for treatment strategies and for criminal justice.Shredded connections deep in the brain. Battered and scarred blood vessels that are no longer able to support neurons. Clumps of dead cell debris marking a long pattern of injury.The results of the autopsy of Robert R. Card II, the Army Reservist who killed 18 people, then himself, in the deadliest shooting in Maine’s history, left little question that his brain was profoundly damaged. But the finding raises other questions that have broad implications for the military and for the nation’s millions of veterans.Mr. Card was a grenade range instructor who never deployed to combat. He is not known to have ever hit his head in a serious car crash, he never played football, and he does not appear to have had any other accidents that might account for the damage to his brain.His only exposure came from routine training blasts on the training range — at a level that is supposed to be safe.If those blasts were still strong enough to profoundly damage his brain, as it appears happened, then how many other troops are being exposed to the same risk? How many veterans may be struggling with similar injuries that have gone unseen or been misunderstood? How should those veterans be treated if they seek mental health care, or are accused of crimes?“The implications are just so large,” said Frank Larkin, a former Navy SEAL and sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate, whose son, Ryan, also a Navy SEAL, died by suicide and was found to have extensive brain damage from blasts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Invisible and unheard: how female veterans suffering trauma are let down by US healthcare

    Invisible and unheard: how female veterans suffering trauma are let down by US healthcareWomen suffer PTSD at twice the rate of men yet their symptoms and stories are often overlooked For Felicia Merkel, the PTSD trigger is any loud sound – an overhead speaker, a slammed car door – transporting her back to the blistering heat of Afghanistan. For Liz Hensel, it is looking into her daughter’s chestnut brown eyes, their color reminding her of those of a young Afghan girl named Medina, who lost her mother and leg at the trauma hospital in Kandahar. For Jen Burch, the intrusive memory is of the man who assaulted her before she deployed.More than a decade has passed since these three women were deployed to Afghanistan. It’s now almost four months since the US military withdrew from Kabul on 30 August. Still, specific memories consume them. Three hundred thousand female veterans served in the 19-year war, and as media coverage dwindles and the nation slowly forgets, Felicia, Liz and Jen continue to remember.Their experiences in Afghanistan differed from those of the male soldiers with whom they served. Now, their stateside lives do too. Being a woman in war comes with its own set of distinct traumas. While congressional legislation that has recently been proposed is welcome, essential bills are still being blocked that would help repair the suffering these women have endured for years.Gender differences exist in trauma exposure. PTSD is twice as common in women than in men, according to a study conducted by Kathryn Magruder at the University of South Carolina.Yet they face additional obstacles when seeking support after their deployment.The Deborah Sampson Act passed in January of this year made gender-specific services available at veteran medical centers across the country.However, on 6 December, House and Senate armed service committee leaders tried to block the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, which would enable veterans to report sexual assault to a neutral third party.Felicia’s husband says she is a lot jumpier now than she used to be. Talking about Afghanistan makes her sad, but as she has gotten older, sounds, not memories, trigger her PTSD. The anxiety hits. She breathes deeply. Then tries, with difficulty, to get her heart rate down.It was December 2010, the year of her first deployment. She was lying in bed at the base at Kandahar, watching American television, when she heard those crashing bumps. Seconds later, the sirens sounded. A rocket had hit. Felicia fell to the floor with a thud and ran for the nearby bunker.It was cold and dusty in there; a dirt track enveloped in a hollow concrete shell. Just feet away, medics worked on a man wounded in the chest; he had no pulse in his left leg. They called for clothing, anything that might be used to stop the bleeding. As the yells of the medics got louder, Felicia’s mind traveled further away.She couldn’t do anything to help. Eleven years later, she still feels that guilt and hears those sounds.She had arrived in Kandahar energetic and excited. She returned to Minnesota a year later, distant and dejected. The months after coming home were the worst. Gritting her teeth through weekly therapy sessions, she insisted that everything was fine. The therapist believed her, even telling her not to come back.On 4 January 2012, Felicia tried to kill herself. She began with a single antidepressant. Then she took five more. Then the bottle. None of her co-workers, family or friends knew about her clinical depression. She spent her 22nd birthday in intensive care.Post-military support at the time, she maintains, was significantly lacking.“Female service members have much more to deal with in the complexity of trauma,” confirmed Jennifer Pacanowski, founder of the non-profit Women’s Veterans Empowered and Thriving. “They also have less access to services, which are not as specialized to their needs as those available to male veterans.”The Deborah Samson Act, a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate in January 2021, will establish a policy to end gender-based sexual harassment and assault by training employees and providing legal services for veterans at risk. It will also staff Veteran Affairs facilities with a permanent female health provider.Felicia wishes she had access to these sorts of resources when she came home. Instead, during a 10-minute evaluation, it was determined she did not have PTSD, and that her grief stemmed only from her mother’s death.She was furious and felt unheard.Looking back, she believes that better healthcare policies for female veterans would have encouraged her to open up about her experiences and struggles sooner. Instead, she dealt with her feelings alone until she needed life-saving help.After deploying in August 2010, Liz began volunteering at Kandahar’s trauma hospital. She had already witnessed death. Just weeks earlier, an injured soldier died with his head resting on her stomach. She dealt with this like any Marine had to do in any high-intensity combat situation: turn off emotion and focus.She could not, however, turn off the memories of the trauma hospital. As the mother of two young daughters, it tugged at every maternal instinct she had.American male service members were not permitted to work at the hospitals. Only because she was female could she see what she now can’t forget.The waiting room that November day was bustling with uncles, fathers, cousins and brothers.No one waited for Medina. Whoever brought the three-year-old Afghani girl had left. Her infected foot could not be saved, and Liz cradled the child as she came out of the anesthesia after the amputation. Rather than waking in familiar arms, Medina’s first sight was this stranger wearing desert camouflage with a pistol at her side. The anguish Liz felt reminded her that she could feel again after months surrounded by death.Now, Medina revisits Liz’s thoughts back in Virginia. She appears in flashbacks when Liz looks at baby photographs of her youngest daughter. She comes to mind when Veterans Day is celebrated on national television.Was the girl still alive? Could Liz have done more to help her? Was she attending school amid the Taliban’s ever-increasing restrictions on women’s freedom?Liz had flown to Afghanistan fearless and determined in 2010 but returned to the US four months later, injured and traumatized.In the weeks after her deployment, Liz felt as if she were watching someone else’s life in a movie. Physically, she was home, but mentally, she was in Kandahar.She tried going through the motions expected of her as a mother and a wife. Doing menial tasks – cooking dinner, hugging her child – things she had been so capable of doing before she left. But it felt to her like a tug of war, the past pulling her back, her mind fighting to remain present.It didn’t help that she felt her pain was invisible to the world. When attending Veterans Affairs medical appointments, the administration staff would sometimes ask her husband, who came along for support, who he was there to see. He would have to correct them and say the appointment was for his wife.It was only when they took the time to listen to Liz’s story that people validated her trauma. Research shows that post-traumatic stress in veterans varies by gender. If hers had been recognized earlier, she wonders, would she still be struggling with it 11 years later?Jen, like Liz, was working in Afghani hospitals because she was a woman. She, too, was haunted by a girl who had lost a foot. But, more, she was haunted by the long-term impacts of sexism and abuse in the military.Jen was sexually assaulted by her supervisor at a US military base, months before she was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010.She was made to report it through her chain of command, but was quickly stopped in her tracks. Everyone loved the man she was accusing.“We’re so glad to have him back,” said the male officer who handled her complaint.Jen wanted to deploy abroad. She knew no one would believe her. So she stopped, fearing that as a victim, she would be isolated.But trauma builds on trauma. This experience made Jen more vulnerable to the horrors she witnessed during her service in Afghanistan. Statistically, a history of sexual assault puts a veteran at higher risk for developing PTSD.Serving at Buckley Space Force Base in Denver, Colorado, when she returned stateside from August 2011 to 2014, things got worse.Jen started to go through some of the lowest moments of her life.Her co-workers assumed that she was being emotional about things because she was a woman. Someone she served with in Afghanistan observed that the only PTSD she had was from eating the bad food. This went on for a year and a half.Jen was assaulted before she arrived in Afghanistan. She worked overtime in the trauma hospital doing mortuary affairs; developed breathing problems; had glass nodules in her lungs. Yet she was perpetually made fun of. It was a very negative culture surrounding her post-deployment.No one wanted to hear her story.Although women are the fastest-growing veteran demographic, she believes that some men still don’t think of women serving in roles of high stress or exposure.Currently, the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act is being blocked. If the act had been passed when Jen was on active service, she would have reported her sexual assault.This is the same for many other women in the military, she believes. And while there is a mountain of legislation being passed to assist female veterans, this is still not enough.“If it means sharing the darkest details of my story, then I’ll keep doing this,” Jen said, “until the gendered gap in veteran healthcare is finally closed”.TopicsPost-traumatic stress disorderWomenUS militaryMental healthUS politicsHealthfeaturesReuse this content More