Personality Disorder Discharges at Christmas

ONE FAMILY'S STORY

Military Spouses for Change (MSC) has successfully fought for one of our soldiers. Nancy is a member of MSC. Her husband, David, has been in the Army for 10 years. He has served a year in Kosovo and two combat tours in Iraq. Unfortunately, he is suffering from PTSD.

Wednesday morning, November 28 2007, David received a packet by his Platoon Sargeant. He was given a "Personality Disorder" discharge (AR 635-200 Chapter 5 Paragraph 5-13) and was ordered to clear his unit and be off post BY DECEMBER 7.

For TEN YEARS OF SERVICE, with no misconduct, David was being kicked out of the Army in TEN DAYS.

According to the Inspector General, the only recourse for David was getting the Colonel who signed these discharge papers to change his mind.

Nancy contacted us. David was supporting his wife and four children as an enlisted soldier in the Army. Christmas is just weeks away.

MSC's leadership immediately began reaching out to our partners, other advocacy and veteran organizations, to get help for David, seeking advice and/or contacts. (The larger we become as an organization, the more organizations we can work with and the more resources we will have access to. That is why telling others about us and joining as an actual member of MSC through our website is so important!) We also have board members who were able to work with David based upon their expertise with the military review board process. We spent two days and nights, nearly around the clock, rattling cages.

By Friday afternoon, November 30th, one Congressperson and two Generals had contacted Darnall Army Medical Center as well as David's chain of command, demanding to know why he had been discharged instead of transfered to the Warrior Transition Unit for evaluation and, if necessary, treatment for PTSD.

By the morning of Saturday, December 1st, David signed into his new unit, the Warrior Transition Unit. These Generals are good men and great leaders. The speed in which they corrected this situation is a testament to their awareness of the seriousness of the situation and their sensitivity to the anxiety of David's family.

What David experienced was a failure of leadership within his personal chain of command. His Chain of Command should have taken steps to proactively evaluate him for his COMBAT-RELATED INJURIES, which PTSD is. Even IF David had a personality disorder, what leader (whose job is to inspire trust and confidence in his/her troops) gives a soldier (with a family no less) ten days to get out during the month of Christmas? Service members committing crimes get more time than that to transition out of the military. This was just egregious to the extreme.

There is another soldier at Fort Lewis, Washington, who is facing the possibility of a personality disorder discharge. MSC has not been in contact with him personally, but according to Joshua Kors, Spc. Lengeman has been in the Army for ten years, served a combat tour in Iraq, is struggling with PTSD, and has recently learned that he has been diagnosed with a personality disorder instead of PTSD. Please contact us ASAP if you think you can help.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Unfortunately, one's experience with the military is very much defined by one's unit. A good unit can make the experience as good as you could imagine and a bad unit can nearly ruin your life. The lack of consistency between units due to this human variable means we have to have some level of protection for our servicemembers, some default upon which they can rely when the leadership within their particular chain of command fails them. In this case, there should be some regulation in place providing for steps that must be taken when a personality disorder is being alleged and a service member has returned from a combat tour.

Between 2001 and 2006, 22,000 service members have been discharged under this "personality disorder" diagnosis (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/kors). Most of them AFTER serving in a combat zone and seeking mental health care. Rather than diagnosing these service members with PTSD, some units are declaring that these service members had a PRE-EXISTING mental health condition and therefore the military is not responsible for their mental health care. They are given a general discharge and, in most cases, billed for any bonuses they may have received for enlisting or re-enlisting.

In July, both the House (HR3167) and the Senate (S1817) introduced bills that would temporarily stop these personality disorder discharges until the DoD could establish some mechanism for reviewing these cases and ensuring that it is not being abused by the military. Both Houses referred these bills to their respective committees and nothing has happened since.

Sen. Kit Bond is asking the President to set up a Special Panel to review the 22,000 cases who have already been kicked out for personality disorders. (http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/washington/story/1FB9AF3F22D30D72862573A300150578?Opendocument). ·

We are sharing this with you because we hope you will share it with others. Many wonder why we created MSC and what MSC does. MSC is an organization comprised primarily of men and women inside the military community and/institutions. Our goal is to educate, empower, and help one another in a way that is sensitive to the position that we are in as members of the military community. We are committed to maintaining a strong military but we believe that requires taking care of our service members and their families. When you compromise the integrity of your human force, you compromise the integrity of your total force.

Our troops need to be able to perform their duties knowing that they will be taken care if something were to happen to them. They cannot fight these battles as well. ANd they shouldn't have to.

Last week it was Nancy's husband. Whose spouse will it be next week?

Become informed.

Become involved.

Become inspired!

Become a Military Spouse for Change. (Or join as a friend of MSC!)
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MSC would like to give special thanks to U.S. Representative Tom Davis and Marcie Roth and the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. We also received great information from Amy Fairweather of San Francisco's Swords to Plowshares, Paul Sullivan at Veterans for Common Sense, and Andrew Pagony at Veterans for America.