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Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

nytimes.com

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Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#251

Post by midjji »

ohialehua wrote: post #34

I didn’t read the article. I mainly come here for the commentary and the backdoor links. But! Hormone replacement therapy is a game changer for a lot of men who have CTE. I’m a clinical social worker. I’ve worked in emergency medicine, correctional medicine, and now outpatient psychotherapy. I used to think HRT was for ego lifters and old ladies. But I have seen first hand the value of HRT for CTE patients. I’ve seen…

HRT does not help with scarring or issues caused by scarring. Lots of other things sure, but not scarring, which is what the article claims is the problem.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#252

Post by alexey-salmin »

sofixa wrote: post #216
logicchains wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Historically, the rationale for excluding women from the draft was that they weren't eligible to serve in combat roles, voluntarily or otherwise Historically countries didn't let women fight in wars because they didn't want their civilisation to die out. If a country loses a double-digit percent of its men it can still repopulate just as quickly, because one man can make multiple women pregnant, while if it loses it…

> Historically countries didn't let women fight in wars because they didn't want their civilisation to die out. If a country loses a double-digit percent of its men it can still repopulate just as quickly, because one man can make multiple women pregnant, while if it loses its women then it takes significantly longer to repopulate, because one woman can't have multiple babies at the same time so the birthrate will ne…

Why on earth would you think laws would be necessary? This mechanism is older than laws or human civilization itself.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#254

Post by scheme271 »

mc32 wrote: post #18
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equality should mean equality! :D

I hear you. But women can continue the line —society. Men can’t bear children —society dies. Men get sent to war, women stay in the homeland, many of the men may not return and the women may have to persevere, with sacrifice but society can push on. If it were reversed, that society may well collapse. The Spartans didn’t send their women off and let the men stay back in the homeland.

Besides Sparta the starkest example of a slaveholding society and the brutality needed to enforce that, they weren't even all that great militarily. They had a run of one to two centuries where they dominated militarily and then they tended to be mediocre at best. Sparta ended up as a tourist spot for romans to see people in funny costumes and hats.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#255

Post by MarkMarine »

Doxon wrote: post #135

Misc info on weapon sound pressure. The Carl Gustav 8.4cm recoilless rifle now be procured by the Marines has a big back-blast through the typical venturi used by these kinds of weapons. In training, (Sweden at least) they are limited to the number of rounds they can fire. I do not know if this for merely hearing loss, or if there are concussive effects. Also, while "small arms" do not typically have concussive effec…

I fired a 50 as part of my job for years, it is nothing like the effects of being near arty being fired. I can't speak to being in an IED blast, but I can speak to being concussed. Yes, the 50 is loud. With hearing protection, I never felt an effect. Whacking my head playing hockey, a motorcycle crash, being knocked out fighting... all of these felt like something. So did being near arty.

One of the things that is becoming apparent in football CTE is that damage is not limited to the big hits, the chronic effects of smaller hits are causing damage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/sports/football/cte-study...

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#256

Post by enugu »

CapstanRoller wrote: post #89
yieldcrv wrote: post #6

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…

One way to think about it is via the concept of body autonomy/sovereignty: your life is in your hands. IMHO dignified peaceful suicide should be a right granted to all free individuals. If one is free to live, why is one not free to die? But that is too radical of an idea, and upsets all sorts of people (especially the money men) Sometimes opting out is the only rational choice. If there is no support in society for…

Suicides do not just happen due to being in extreme, incurable pain. People commit suicides due to emotions which seem powerful immediately(failure in love life, academics, career etc.) but would not seem as such a big deal if they were to look back on it afterwards either due to the passing of time or due to finding something else which made life worthwhile.

This also is the problem with the autonomy argument - this is not what the person might themselves would choose if they were in a more sober mood. The autonomy argument is also seen as invalid in other situations like when signing oneself to slavery.

Money men being against suicide for economic reasons runs contrary another other point in your post - money might be saved by the suicide of the invalid and sick. Making suicide legal can easily be abused by powerful state officials incentivizing people to commit suicide for economic or political reasons.

So yes, create a good social support system, but don't encourage suicide.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#257

Post by MarkMarine »

bikenaga wrote: post #9

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 as…

In bootcamp my SDI was a stinger gunner. It cost something like 60k for him to "practice" firing, including the cost of the drone. He was a SSGT, had been in for 11 years at the time I knew him, and he'd actually fired the weapon once. There was another gunner there training at the same time, so two people fired at the same drone.

We can train everyone without this level of exposure, and I can imagine a world where your dose is tracked like radiation, kept to a safe level, and people are forced into retirement after they hit the limit.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#258

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hughesjj wrote: post #212
xkqd wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To everyone’s surprise, we still are engaging in trench warfare. Maybe the USA isn’t currently involved in a war where they’re digging and in the trenches, but Eastern Europe right now is proving that trenches aren’t going anywhere.

Come to think of it, I'm unaware of any war over the last 100 years between conventional forces that didn't involve trench warfare. The biggest difference/innovation as of late is inverting the trench, bringing the dirt/sandbags above ground instead of the soldiers below ground https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion

> I'm unaware of any war over the last 100 years between conventional forces that didn't involve trench warfare

Anything involving modern combined-arms warfare. Iraq, for example.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#259

Post by manuel_w »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #180
joegibbs wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting that at the time, in WW1, it was assumed to be a physical injury to the brain caused by the shockwave of exploding artillery shells (hence the name). A few years later a consensus evolved that it's a psychological problem caused by the stress of combat, which was the prevailing opinion for about 100 years. And now it's looking like it might actually be a physical injury caused by shockwave damage t…

Well the good thing they went forward back then and invented the modern helmet to protect people in trenches from overhead explosions. And incredibly it seems that the Adrian helmet still outperforms modern helmet designs in the blast protection quality. [1] It can't stop a bullet sure, but I suspect that chances of being hit by an overhead blast are higher than that a of a headshot in a typical warfare scenario. [1]…

FYI, also modern helmets are not designed to stop bullets but rather to protect from shrapnel and hand grenades. Stopping a bullet would mean breaking the wearers neck. (The kinetic energy needs to go somewhere after all.)

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#260

Post by WA »

ok_dad wrote: post #186
WalterBright wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine is now drafting old men.

Ukraine doesn’t have 350 million citizens and the world’s 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 7th largest air forces, ten times more aircraft carriers than the next country, the worlds most effective military training, and a total military budget of more than the next 15 or 20 countries. If we sent troops to Ukraine, Russia would be out within weeks, and we’d have less casualties than Iraq and Afghanistan, assuming Putin didn’t start…

They probably said the same in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. "Merely weeks until victory." And as percentage of GDP, military spending was even higher back then: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
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