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Last spring, months before an Army psychiatrist allegedly opened fire at Ft. Hood, Dr. Stephen Stahl visited the same military base to teach and evaluate its mental-health system.
His verdict: the Army is failing to adequately treat its warriors whose wounds aren’t visible. At Ft. Hood, “they’re so under-resourced that people just don’t end up getting enough care,” Stahl told The New York Times. The counselors suffer too, he said: “it’s a horrible place to practice psychiatry.”
When I chatted briefly with the Carlsbad-based psychiatrist last week, Stahl said that there are about as many psychiatrists in the Army as there are in San Diego. That, he says, is not nearly enough: When it comes to mental disease, “I’m not quite sure the Army believes these illnesses are real.”
I’ll be talking again tomorrow to Stahl, the subject of next weekend’s Q&A.
If you have any questions about military mental-health care you’d like me to ask, drop me a line by mid-morning tomorrow. You can read more about Stahl’s background here.