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Mad world: Conditions for disaster
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Fort Hood Church
When an Army psychiatrist opens fire on fellow soldiers, one is forced to think about what kind of duress makes an expert in the field of mental health lose his grip. What makes a man who made a career of helping become deadly? One day later in Orlando a bankrupt engineer walks into his former employer’s office and opens fire on workers. Now one has to wonder, has the whole world gone mad?
In the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, he was playing with fire. The treatment of injured troops, many of whom suffer from post traumatic stress (PTSD), is not exact. There is no precise way to rehabilitate every soldier and no way to measure the extent to which they are affected by combat. The fact that the suicide rate of soldiers on active duty has climbed since last year is a clear indication of the psychological ramifications of warfare. Meanwhile, the military employs too few mental health care providers and those who are become overworked. This inefficient system is a known problem, and despite promises in the last two years, nothing has been done to alleviate the problem. Because of bureaucratic quicksand and feet-dragging the very position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for health affairs is not permanently filled, the mental health of troops hanging in the balance.
When someone like Hasan whose job was to fix the problem becomes the very instigator of violence and misery, troops have no one to trust. The Warrior Combat Stress Reset Program on which Hasan worked is meant to teach soldiers to cope with the effects PTSD. Speculation that Hasan was residually stressed by treating troops, only makes the public that much more concerned about the principle stress being put on those during active service. Faced with the prospect of being deployed, we can only assume Hasan was desperate enough to do anything. Hasan killed thirteen soldiers and injured many more. But why attack other troops, those who only the day before he was rehabilitating? A similar story in May broke news when Sgt. John M. Russell opened fire in the Camp Liberty crisis center in Iraq killing five soldiers. The longest war in modern American history is obviously having some of the strangest and most widely felt effects. The carnage is most certainly telling us something about the negative ripple effects of combat on formerly reasonable, law-abiding Americans.
In Orlando, 40 year-old Jason Rodriguez turned on his former colleagues two years after losing his job at the firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills. Working for Subway and filing for bankruptcy this year, Rodriquez appeared to be just one more professional degraded by the state of the economy. Not surprisingly, his attorney is making the same case, citing Rodriquez’s unemployment, divorce, bankruptcy and foreclosure as his motivation for the shootings. In his unqualified opinion, his attorney believes he is “very, very mentally ill” [LA Times]. Struggling to keep work and relieve his debt, Rodriguez held the firm responsible for his problems. The firm claims they fired Rodriquez in 2007 citing “performance issues” [BBC] not blanket lay-offs. This doesn’t exactly gel with the headlines like Johnson & Johnson laying off nearly 7000 employees. Empathy for Rodriquez becomes even harder to muster, when we take into account how many Americans are struggling with the same problems and more. There is a common thread between Rodriguez’s crime and the shooting at Fort Hood: misdirection of hostility. Helpless to change the course of their lives or at least perceiving themselves as such both Hasan and Rodriquez lashed out. Studies have shown that learned helplessness not only increases depression but also hostility (Miller & Seligman, 1975). If insurmountable stress is a powder keg even for the most average or educated person, then it’s important for the rest of us to take steps to insulate ourselves from the kind of violent outbursts that combined took the lives of fourteen innocent people, but much like our troops we are left wondering where to turn.
