SUMMARY: How do former service members cope with one of the most stressful jobs in the military? Judy, Ty and Jamie, three female veterans who served in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit, offer their Brief but Spectacular takes on post-traumatic growth and transitioning into civilian life.
SUMMARY: President Trump awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on Wednesday to Sgt. Maj. John Canley, who saved fellow Marines in Vietnam. Meanwhile, another veteran made headlines recently by admitting that he needed saving. Kansas City mayoral candidate Jason Kander dropped out of the race citing PTSD. Reps. Ruben Gallego (D) and Brian Mast (R) join Nick Schifrin to discuss challenges for younger veterans.
SUMMARY: For C.J. Hardin, an Army veteran, dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder is an everyday feat. After years of pills and therapy failed to help his disorder, Hardin knew he needed an alternative. So he turned to a surprising substitute that's at the forefront of a revolution in neuroscience and medicine: psychedelics like MDMA and psilocybin. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.
SGT. C.J. HARDIN (RET.), U.S. Army Veteran: I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Fort Campbell.
MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour): C.j. Hardin is a former Army helicopter mechanic and machine gunner who faced imminent death in Iraq, and also after he got home.
C.J. HARDIN: The way that my emotions ran, and how it felt uncontrollable, I didn't trust myself having a weapon around me, because I was suicidal, very suicidal at that point.
MILES O'BRIEN: Years of pills and talk therapy failed to help his post-traumatic stress disorder. So, he turned to a surprising alternative at the center of a revolution in neuroscience and medicine.
DR. MICHAEL MITHOEFER, Therapist: So, this is the MDMA that we use for the current study.
MILES O'BRIEN: Hardin took MDMA, more commonly known as Ecstasy, under the watchful eyes of therapists Michael and Annie Mithoefer, a husband-and-wife team based in Charleston, South Carolina.
DR. MICHAEL MITHOEFER: This is where we do the MDMA sessions.
We don't know how this works, but we have ideas about it.
MILES O'BRIEN: In one study of 19 subjects, more than 80 percent reported significant improvement, after carefully guided sessions like this.
SGT. C.J. HARDIN: Which I knew was the PTSD. I was never feeling comfortable at home.
I was still lucid, but it just felt like I had opened up a new avenue of thinking.
MILES O'BRIEN: C.J. Hardin says the difference for him was like night and day.
SGT. C.J. HARDIN: I had three experiences at full dosage, but the effects after the first treatment were profound. I would have said a 60 percent reduction in my symptoms immediately. I felt a mighty change had occurred.
SUMMARY: For years, the military has struggled to deal with the unseen, psychological wounds of war, especially Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Now, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has instituted major changes to the rules affecting sailors and Marines who suffer from PTSD. Mabus joins John Yang to explain the reforms and why they are necessary.
JOHN YANG (NewsHour): The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have killed thousands of American servicemen and maimed and injured tens of thousands more, but some wounds are not as easily seen or identified.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, afflicts as much as one-fifth of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in any given year. Compounding the affliction, personnel who were kicked out of the military because of erratic behavior caused by PTSD, by Traumatic Brain Injury, called TBI, or by other mental health conditions often lose their benefits, including access to veterans health care.
But that will now change for at least one of the services, navy personnel, sailors and Marines, under a new policy enacted by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
Secretary Mabus joins us now.
Thank you for joining us.
RAY MABUS, Secretary of the Navy: Glad to be here.
JOHN YANG: Tell us what this new policy is and why you made this change.
RAY MABUS: The policy that we had been operating under was, if somebody committed misconduct, the erratic behavior you were talking about, that took preference over everything else in terms of a discharge.
And so people would get discharged with bad paper, with discharges that didn’t give them any benefits when they left. What we have done with policy that I have just signed was to say, if you’re being administratively discharged for some misconduct, we’re going to take a look to see if you have got a diagnosable condition, to see if you have got PTSD, to see if you have got Traumatic Brain Injury, and then that will factor in, so that you may still be discharged, but you will be discharged with benefits, with help that we’re going to recognize the reason for this erratic behavior and give you help after you leave the military.
And it’s not just for combat injuries, combat wounds. It’s also for things like sexual assault that is often followed by PTSD.
JOHN YANG: And just to be clear, you say that this conduct took precedence.
In other words, it didn’t matter that the misconduct may have had an underlying cause.
RAY MABUS: Right.
The only thing that was looked at was the misconduct. And the discharge was based on that misconduct without why it was caused, without PTSD evaluation, without TBI evaluation. And the awful thing was, when people left under this circumstance, they got no benefits.
So, they couldn’t get into veterans health care. They couldn’t get the assistance they needed to deal with PTSD or to deal with Traumatic Brain Injury. It was a pure policy issue. And this is not just for people being discharged now, not just for active-duty people. If you’re a veteran, and you were discharged and got bad paper, and so you’re not getting any benefits, and you believe that it was caused by in some way or another PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury, come back. We will take another look at it.
We will take another run at the determination of the discharge. If it is found by that, you will be able to get your benefits, even if you have been discharged for a while.
