In 1997, Congress ordered the military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops. The newspaper, citing Pentagon statistics, said fewer than 1 in 300 service members were referred to a mental health professional before shipping out for Iraq as of October.
Twenty-two US troops committed suicide in Iraq last year, accounting for nearly 1 in 5 of noncombat deaths and the highest suicide rate since the war started, the newspaper said.
Some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring, the Courant reported. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for ''extended deployments."
''I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on [antidepressants], when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal," said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a New York-based advocacy group. ''You're creating chemically activated time bombs."
Although Defense Department standards for enlistment disqualify recruits who have post-traumatic stress disorder, the military also is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria, the newspaper said.
''I'm concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country," said Dr. Arthur S. Blank Jr., a psychiatrist who helped get post-traumatic stress disorder recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War.
The Army's top mental health specialist, Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, acknowledged that some deployment practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.
''The challenge for us . . . is that the Army has a mission to fight. And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge," she said. ''And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers' personal needs."
Ritchie insisted the military works hard to prevent suicides, but said that is a challenge because every soldier has access to a weapon. Commanders, not medical professionals, have final say over whether a soldier is retained in the war zone, but military officials said most commanders understand the need for treatment.
