Veterans and Brain Disease

There are a lot of numbers being tossed around about suicides among active duty military personnel and veterans returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, and I don't have any idea which are correct, but they are obviously horrific.  I have found two different sources that say a member of the active-duty military commits suicide every 36 hours and that suicide now accounts for more service deaths than combat.  I've heard this elsewhere as well.  The same two sources say that a returned veteran attempts suicide every 80 minutes. (I'd give you links, but you can do a google search and find the same things I did, if you wish.)

What if Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is physical and not psychological?  According to Nicholas Kristof's column today in the NY Times, autopsies of veterans who have committed suicide show the same degenerative brain damage as that suffered by boxers, football players and other athletes who take repeated blows to the head. It has a name, abbreviated to C.T.E. 

"In people with C.T.E., an abnormal form of a protein accumulates and eventually destroys cells throughout the brain, including the frontal and temporal lobes. Those are areas that regulate impulse control, judgment, multitasking, memory and emotions"

"So far, just this one case of a veteran with C.T.E. has been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. But at least three groups of scientists are now conducting brain autopsies on veterans, and they have found C.T.E. again and again, experts tell me. Publication of this research is in the works"

 As Kristof points out, soldier returned from Vietnam did not have nearly the same level of suicides as do those from Iraq and Afghanistan, probably because they had much less exposure to the kind of brain-crashing blasts as the current veterans. I don't know if that is true, thankfully, but there isn't a columnist going that I trust more than Kristof.

If this is true, the worst is yet to come.