[HN Gopher] Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs W...
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Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by
Suicide
Author : thelastgallon
Score : 55 points
Date : 2024-06-30 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| haltingproblem wrote:
| https://archive.ph/MzZMw
| ViktorRay wrote:
| This is excellent journalism.
|
| Digging into an issue that is affecting lives in such a drastic
| way and bringing these issues to light.
|
| Like this part of the article for example:
|
| _Until The Times told the Navy of the lab's findings about the
| SEALs who died by suicide, the Navy had not been informed, the
| service confirmed in a statement. A Navy officer close to the
| SEAL leadership expressed audible shock, and then frustration,
| when told about the findings by The Times. "That's the problem,"
| said the officer, who asked not to be named in order to discuss a
| sensitive topic. "We are trying to understand this issue, but so
| often the information never reaches us."_
| vunderba wrote:
| This was a really well-written article. I think for years I had
| naturally thought that traumatic brain injury as a result of
| explosives basically caused the brain to rattle so hard that it
| smashed against the skull causing contusions, but apparently this
| is something different.
|
| The way it's explained in the article is that this is actually a
| result of the blast energy wave bouncing off of differently dense
| brain tissue sections and causing cavitation.
|
| I'm glad that these issues are finally being brought to light,
| It's truly unfortunate that no matter how highly trained and
| skilled some of these soldiers are, that blast waves from IEDs or
| in this case from their own munitions can result in such
| insidious physiological changes.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| From what I've heard from people in artillery is that the brass
| hardly cares about occupational safety. If they need to get
| rounds down field they get rounds down field first and make
| sure you have proper ppe for that second. And what ppe they do
| have is seen as improper. Not much you can even do when the
| issue is local blast damage and the gun design demands you to
| be so close to it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yet another reason to not join the military. You're just fuel
| for the machine.
|
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/06/14/armys-
| recruit...
| snakeyjake wrote:
| I was an infantryman in the Army for ten years, from 1998 to
| 2008, and deployed three times, twice to Iraq,
|
| Encounters with IEDs were common, especially during the surge.
|
| So many of my friends have died to suicide or have killed
| themselves due to drugs and/or alcohol that it is hard to keep
| track.
|
| Now that primadonna seals are dying maybe someone will pay
| attention.
|
| Thankfully the only lasting effects of my deployments seem to be
| a bad back and distaste for authority.
| ein0p wrote:
| Do you think it's because of whatever brain damage they may
| have encountered, or because they could not find meaning in
| their civilian lives? I've read it's often the latter in
| military men, especially the ones that really believed in the
| mission and were in highly stressful life or death situations.
| They come back and they're taken aback by the mundane bullshit
| that our lives are in comparison to what they've been through.
| Intuitively that rings true, but having never served, I can't
| fully relate.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >Do you think it's because of whatever brain damage they may
| have encountered, or because they could not find meaning in
| their civilian lives?
|
| I have no idea.
|
| Strangely the most common thread seems to be the ones who off
| themselves went back home after getting out.
|
| Almost everyone I know who got out and stayed away from home
| is doing ok. Almost everyone I know who got out and went back
| home is a wreck.
|
| Some had TBI exposures, some didn't.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This is the kind of research I've been yearning to see on
| suicide.
|
| Just telling people not to, or to call a hotline, seemed like the
| worst most patronizing advice as it never solved the underlying
| thing.
|
| I've since learned that there is a _subset_ of suicidal people
| where that 's enough, where the suicidal tendency is a kneejerk
| decision that can be disrupted, but it bugged me that its not
| serving everyone that becomes suicidal with a recurring condition
| that's not improved by merely being present.
|
| It always feel like people are too uncomfortable to talk about it
| enough, or to question the response measures. A "I'm Helping!"
| sentiment by copy and pasting a suicide hotline memo, when
| they're not helping at all, just offloading their discomfort into
| a protective layer for their own psyche.
|
| In contrast, I'm comfortable enough to wonder whether suicide was
| the most rationale and objectively best choice, as someone with
| strong self preservation circuits you can see how far apart I am
| from everyone else. But this is opinion, a hunch, what I really
| want is a data driven analysis of the conditions. As with real
| science, I am accepting of any conclusion, instead of trying to
| conform a conclusion to preventing it if prevention isn't what
| winds up being on the table with our current infrastructure.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Of course it doesn't reach them. Same with any black project, the
| dangers get swept under the rug.
| bikenaga wrote:
| From a couple of the sources referred to in the article:
|
| _Impact of repeated blast exposure on active-duty United States
| Special Operations Forces_ -
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2313568121
|
| "We performed a multimodal study of active-duty United States
| Special Operations Forces (SOF)--an elite group repeatedly
| exposed to explosive blasts in training and combat--to identify
| diagnostic biomarkers of brain injury associated with repeated
| blast exposure (RBE). We found that higher blast exposure was
| associated with alterations in brain structure, function, and
| neuroimmune markers, as well as lower quality of life.
| Neuroimaging findings converged on an association between
| cumulative blast exposure and the rostral anterior cingulate
| cortex (rACC), a widely connected brain region that modulates
| cognition and emotion. This work supports the use of a network-
| based approach, focusing on the rACC, in future studies
| investigating the impact of RBE on SOF brain health."
|
| _Characterisation of interface astroglial scarring in the human
| brain after blast exposure: a post-mortem case series_ -
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27291520/
|
| "The blast exposure cases showed a distinct and previously
| undescribed pattern of interface astroglial scarring at
| boundaries between brain parenchyma and fluids, and at junctions
| between grey and white matter. This distinctive pattern of
| scarring may indicate specific areas of damage from blast
| exposure consistent with the general principles of blast
| biophysics, and further, could account for aspects of the
| neuropsychiatric clinical sequelae reported. The generalisability
| of these findings needs to be explored in future studies, as the
| number of cases, clinical data, and tissue availability were
| limited."
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(page generated 2024-06-30 23:03 UTC)