S “Each time I returned home, I
would bring more emotional baggage, and I wasn’t dealing with it properly,” McCasland recalls. “In Iraq, as a pla- toon sergeant I was expected to be the rock everyone else leaned on, so obviously I couldn’t reveal that I was having problems myself.” As the pressure of his job in-
creased, McCasland became an emotional time bomb. During visits home, he fought constantly with his wife and his children walked on eggshells around him because of his explosive temper. On a mid-tour leave during his fi nal deployment, McCasland even considered suicide. “It didn’t scare me. It wasn’t shocking to me. It was just another thought of the day,” McCasland says. “When I returned to Iraq for my last six months, I always kept that as an option.” McCasland’s wife begged him to seek help, but he would either blow her off or attend one or two coun- seling sessions just to get her off his back. In desperation, she fi nally
58 MILITARY OFFICER SEPTEMBER 2015
SGT. 1ST CLASS DONALD MCCASLAND, USA (RET), served three combat tours in Iraq as a platoon sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division. It was grueling duty, both physically and emotion- ally, and took a heavy toll on both McCasland and his family.
gave him an ultimatum: Get help or the marriage is over. Unwilling to lose his wife and
family, McCasland agreed to coun- seling. He started with couples coun- seling and, after a few appointments, realized he had his own personal issues to deal with, so he asked for a referral for individual counseling.
Therapy plus McCasland found talk therapy very benefi cial, especially after he in- corporated an innovative approach called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which helps patients process distressing memories and reduce their harmful eff ects using sensory input, including side-to-side eye movements, while recalling these events. Eventually, the patient is able to develop more eff ective coping mechanisms. “EMDR really benefi ted me,” says
McCasland, now a licensed master social worker and program direc- tor with Soldiers and Families Em- braced, a Tennessee-based nonprofi t
organization that provides counsel- ing to active duty military personnel and veterans and their families. “It doesn’t work for everyone, but it worked out well for me.” McCasland is one of a growing number of combat veterans who have found relief for post-traumatic stress symptoms with the help of comple- mentary and alternative medicine (CAM), typically provided through a personal physician or VA medical center. In fact, CAM has been a part of post-traumatic stress treatment at the VA for many years and continues to grow in popularity. A 2012 report published in the journal Psychiatric Services notes that of the 125 VA post- traumatic stress treatment programs that responded to the survey, 96 per- cent reported use of at least one CAM treatment, and 86 percent off ered CAMs other than those that are a part of more traditional treatments. According to Dr. Paula Schnurr,
acting executive director of the Na- tional Center for PTSD within the VA, among the most common comple- mentary approaches are mindfulness meditation, other types of meditation, yoga, tai chi, and acupuncture. Tech- niques widely used as part of more standard health psychiatry protocols include stress management, progres- sive muscle relaxation, and guided imagery for stress reduction. “It’s helpful to understand that
there are two broad domains of ef- fectiveness with CAM,” Schnurr says. “One would be treating PTSD symptoms directly, perhaps using the alternative treatment as a pri- mary treatment for PTSD. The other would be as a complementary treat- ment to supplement other sorts of treatments or to treat conditions the person is experiencing that might not be part of the PTSD.”
Diff erent types of CAM The Naval Center for Combat and Operational Stress Control
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