Psych Relief Finally On Its Way for Vets

The NYTimes reported today that (finally!) regulations may be changing for veterans in need of psychiatric care. Thus far, soldiers and former soldiers have had to "prove" their need for such care through documentation of their experiences in combat, which is (needless to say) ridiculous and with a marked LACK of understanding about what exactly mental illness is. For the full article read here. One fascinating report indicates that as many as 20% of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq suffer from PTSD.

The problems surrounding soldiers and their psychological states are myriad. This article on what happens to soldiers gone AWOL, from TomDispatch a while back (now linked through Common Dreams), talks about the conditions under which AWOL soldiers are imprisoned. Military industrial complex and prison industrial complex collapse and become one. Almost poetic. Mostly just frustrating and upsetting. It makes me wonder if everyone doesn't see these connections, too, and why the masses aren't demanding CHANGE right now!!!!! Or if they are, how the dominant patriarchy manages to keep it stifled and hidden...I know that millions of Americans are affected by these situations far more than I am, in my little bubble of privilege... AH

In related news, all of the Hawaiian female inmates in a Kentucky prison are being removed from the Otter Creek Correctional Center after widespread documentation of serious sexual abuse. Kentucky is one of the only states in which sex between a prison guard and an inmate is a misdemeanor rather than a felony, and at least five correctional officers (including one chaplain) has been proven, at this point, to have had sex with the women at Otter Creek. (For the full NYTimes article read here.)

Interestingly, the discourse in the NYTimes article and how officials are explaining this absurd abuse of power is how problematic private, for-profit prisons are and how they lack transparency... as if government run prisons are these oases of justice and rehabilitation. And while the article explains WHY Hawaiian women are in Kentucky prisons (lack of adequate funding and beds in HI, for example) they don't really even begin to talk about the tensions that can emerge and how the rape of Hawaiian imprisoned women fits into a history of violence and repression (sexual and otherwise) against indigenous women in the Americas. I guess that would be expecting too much from the NYTimes... but it's disturbing in the implication that your average privileged Times reader is not encouraged to examine this as anything more than a glitch in the system rather than an example of what the system requires.

(Note: While the article doesn't specify that the women are indigenous Hawaiians, I have to assume that some of the victims are, considering the disproportionate numbers of native Hawaiians who are locked up in the U.S. today.)