More About Soldier Jonathan Norrell, PTSD Sufferer
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Afghanistan, Health Care, Iraq, Mental Health, Military, WarI saw this in the comments from my post today, Nearly 1 In 5 Soldiers Have PTSD:
I’m the Vet who contacted Carissa Piccard and Liz Dozier at CBS. Jonathan & I talked for over an hour today. He agrees that both Carissa & Liz totally rock. So do I – in spades. Jonathan is still waiting for a medical discharge, wants to get productive again and realizes he has some new limitations with which to deal.Time constraints for Liz’s piece left out a couple of details. Jonathan Norrell is one hell of a kid. A goof-off in High School, he got a GED to get into the service. He did so well that he got to be a medic. This day & age – that’s unheard of in the Army.
In Iraq you heard about the IED’s he encountered, but not all the firefights. Traumatic Brain Injury is strongly suspected & hasn’t been checked out by the DOD yet.
You didn’t hear that he endured demeaning treatment from his Commanding Officer for “faking itâ€. There’s more, but Jonathan’s prime concern is that he is only the most vocal one at Ft. Hood. His unit will return to Iraq. He tells me only a fraction are mentally up to the challenge.
My thoughts are with Norrell and all those who have fought for us and suffer from this awful condition. Let’s hope we bring them all home soon.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 and is filed under Afghanistan, Health Care, Iraq, Mental Health, Military, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 20th, 2008 at 7:27 am
It is unfortunate that Jonathan is having to endure this. The truth is that the Armed services are having difficulty determining what is going on in these injuries. By the admission of pyhsicians in the military, in the veterans administration and civilian facilities specializing in Brain Injuries these injuries are different. Physicians will not diagnose what they are not trained to recognize.
WHile the exclusion of the PTSD cannot be made, the injury Jonathan may have is a physical injury sustained by exposure to blast ovepressure, the injury is quite similar to that experienced by divers exposed to extreme pressures. The military knows this as it appears in their own literature- Textbook of Military Medicine.