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A recent Government Accountability Office report on the Defense Centers for Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCOE) said that the center has been unable to define and justify its mission before Congress, making it hard to allocate funding for the center. Data showing the DCOE's findings and progress aren't readily available to Congress, making it that much harder for members to understand the center.
"[DCOE was] not able to explain to us in any clarity what they're about, what they intend to do in the future, how much it's going to cost and what value will come out of that spending," Denise Fantone, a GAO director who helped supervise the investigation, told NPR.
This is just the latest blow for the DOD relating to soldiers' psyches. NPR and ProPublica collaborated this year on a series of investigations titled "Brain Wars: How the military is failing its wounded," which examines brain injuries and PTSD, the "signature injury" of recent veterans.
Because DCOE comprises a relatively small part of the Department of Defense's budget, the GAO said, the program has fallen through the cracks. GAO recommended that the DCOE work with the director of Tricare, another military medical arm, to "develop and use additional narrative in budget justifications." In other words, DCOE needs to amp up their message and prove that the work they've been doing since established in 2008 is doing good, or else risk budgetary ramifications from Congress.
Approximately 44,000 service members have been wounded in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them requiring outpatient services for brain injuries and psychological symptoms. Despite the Defense Department's authorization of DCOE in 2008, the Pentagon's health insurance still does not cover treatment for soldiers with brain injuries, and the center's work has not been widely known.
Because so many cases of PTSD go undiagnosed and untreated, there is no definitive number for how many soldiers have been affected.
"Clearly, the Pentagon is overdue in responding to our nation's wounded warriors," Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) said in a February statement about treatment for brain-injured soldiers. "It's time to act."
That makes psychologists some of the kookiest people.
But seriously, what is the brain injury problem doing in a psych program? That's a medical problem.
Of course, brain injury does tend to cause psychological problems, just like a lot of other injuries do. But neither the docs nor the psychs know what to do about those, unless of course they abandon their theories and operate on good sense!
I continue to look forward to the day when these guys will start doing something useful. Until then, for real answers we must look elsewhere.