TedPage: War on Mental Health

There is a debate in congress on the role of security contractors in US policy. While I'm concerned at the use of contractors (almost doubling the US force in Iraq) I'm more concerned about the people who are those contractors.

I think that it is safe to say that the risk of PTSD is the same for enlisted military as contractors. Maybe even higher as the contractors haven't been through bootcamp. But, the support structure when they return home is entirely different. The military has the VA and the contractors have... well... money. The VA makes a tremendous effort to help those who have been at war reintegrate into society providing things like support groups and they are trained to look for things like PTSD. And the contractors have... nothing.

This will become a societal problem. As we have these contractors returning home they'll have the same problems that our military personnel have returning back to society, without support. We'll have a group of people trained in military techniques that are disenfranchised and can't reconnect with the support structures they have. It's likely that violence will ensue. They'll return to their training and back to the last times they felt like they were in control; when they were in Iraq.

I don't like to leave problems without some ideas of solutions, but I think that it might be too late for a reasonable solution. I think the right thing would have been to require the contractors to guarantee the same benefits as the military to their employees. I don't think we can do that retroactively. We need to either grandfather those people into benefits or deal with their problems as they happen.