US Army Psychiatry in the Vietnam War : New Challenges in Extended Counterinsurgency Warfare.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (788 pages)
- Textbooks of Military Medicine Series .
- Textbooks of Military Medicine Series .
Intro -- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -- FOREWORD -- PREFACE -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Prologue | A Psychiatrist's Experience During the Drawdown in Vietnam:Coping With Epidemic Demoralization, Dissent, and Dysfunction at the Tipping Point -- Chapter 1 | Contexts of the Vietnam War and Army Psychiatry: A Debilitating War Fought a Long Way From Home -- Chapter 2 | Overview of the Army's Accelerating Psychiatric and Behavioral Challenges: From Halcyon to Heroin -- Chapter 3 | Organization of Army Psychiatry, I: Psychiatric Services in the Combat Divisions -- Chapter 4 | Organization of Army Psychiatry, II: Hospital-Based Services and the Theater Psychiatric Leadership -- Chapter 5 | The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research Survey of Army Psychiatrists Who Served in Vietnam -- Chapter 6 | Combat Stress and Its Effects: Combat's Bloodless Casualties -- Chapter 7 | Treatment of Combat Reaction Casualties: Providing Humanitarian Care While "Protecting Peace in Southeast Asia" -- Chapter 8 | Deployment Stress, Inverted Morale, and Psychiatric Attrition: "We Are the Unwilling, Led by the Unquali ed, Doing the Unnecessary, for the Ungrateful" -- Chapter 9 | Substance Abuse in the Theater: The Big Story -- Chapter 10 | Preventive Social Psychiatry and Command Consultation: Who Is the Patient-The Soldier or His Military Unit? -- Chapter 11 | Operational Frustrations and Ethical Strain for Army Psychiatrists: "Crushing Burdens and Painful Memories" -- Chapter 12 | Lessons Learned: Linking the Long, Controversial War to Unsustainable Psychiatric and Behavioral Losses -- ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS -- APPENDICES.
NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRODUCT -- OVERSTOCK SALE - Significantly reduced list price This book tells the mostly forgotten story of the accelerating mental health problems that arose among the troops sent to fight in South Vietnam, especially the morale, discipline, and heroin crisis that ultimately characterized the second half of the war. This situation was unprecedented in U.S. military history and dangerous, and reflected the fact that during the war America underwent its most divisive period since the Civil War and, as a result, the war became bitterly controversial. The author is a career Army psychiatrist who led a psychiatric unit in Vietnam. In the years following his return, he was dismayed to discover that the Army had conducted no formal review of this alarming situation, including from the standpoint of military psychiatry, and had lost or destroyed all of the pertinent clinical records. In addition to permitting a study of the psychological wounds and their treatment in Vietnam, these records would have been priceless in the treatment of the legions of veterans who presented serious adjustment problems and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. As a consequence, Dr Camp has been relentless in combing the professional, civilian, and surviving military literature--including unpublished documents--to construct a compelling narrative documenting the successes and failures of Army psychiatry and the Army leadership in Vietnam in responding to these psychiatric and behavioral challenges. The result is a book that is both scholarly and intensely personal, includes vivid case material and anecdotes from colleagues who also served there, and is replete with illustrations and correspondence. It presents the story of Vietnam in a fresh manner--through the psychiatrist's eyes, and sensibilities.