Soldiers to get mental health evaluations

INDIANAPOLIS – Members of an Indiana National Guard brigade returning in November from a deployment to Iraq will spend time meeting with mental health counselors before heading home to their families.

That requirement for about 3,200 soldiers from the 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team will be a change. Previously, Hoosier troops received an immediate 48-hour pass upon their return.

Families will be invited to a reception in an airport hangar after the arrival of the unit, which has been in the Middle East since March. The soldiers will then head to Camp Atterbury, the National Guard base about 20 miles south of Indianapolis, for three to five days of decompressing that puts an emphasis on mental health.

“We’ve learned some lessons,” Indiana Adjutant Gen. R. Martin Umbarger told The Indianapolis Star. “A lot of soldiers do the ‘manly’ thing – ‘Hey, I’m OK.’ And then, 90 days later, you begin to have problems, and your family is having trouble.”

The soldiers will receive mandatory “reintegration” briefings from mental health counselors upon their return and during weekend Guard duty for the next year. One-on-one sessions and sessions involving families will also be available.

Mental-health counseling is not new to returning soldiers, but it used to be optional. Many soldiers frequently passed.

Pentagon statistics released in May show the number of troops diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder jumped by almost 50 percent in 2007, bringing the total to nearly 40,000 since the Iraq invasion five years ago.

An independent study released this year by the RAND Corporation estimated the number at 300,000.

“It’s no longer just about a welcome-home ceremony; it’s not so simple as that,” said Belinda Ireland, a counselor with the Guard’s family programs division whose husband has been deployed three times. “Our soldiers are going to come home with a lot of different issues.”