Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
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Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#2Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#3This 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.”
Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#4This 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.
Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#5I 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.
Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#6This 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.
Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#7Of course it doesn't reach them. Same with any black project, the dangers get swept under the rug.
Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#8I 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 deploymen…
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 experienced 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.
Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#9From 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."
Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide
#10This 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 tiss…
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.