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Treating PTSD: It's a maze of pills, possibilities for troops, vets

By JC Jones and Jacob Brooks Killeen Daily Herald
Nov 15, 2015
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Army veteran Eric Terry sits next to pills he once used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder Wednesday at his home in Temple. Terry uses other methods now to treat his condition.

Eric J. Shelton | Herald

Former Army Sgt. Eric Terry returned from Iraq in 2007. Friends of his died during the yearlong deployment, and he experienced close calls with mortars and other attacks.

Working as a military police officer at Fort Hood during the next two years, he increasingly became anxious, especially in large crowds. He had trouble sleeping. He began drinking heavily. All the warning signs were there, and he suspected he had post-traumatic stress disorder.

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(1) comment

Dean Becker Nov 15, 2015 1:22pm

Good to see. The drug war is a grim, very grim fairy tale. A story of fear and separation, of anxiety and dissonance. It began life as a polemic, a story of blacks and Mexicans getting so high they might rape white womenfolk. It grew over the decades to include fear of children having access, (even though the current black market ensures drugs can be found in every high school in the US), and has escalated to massive fear of the thousands of violent gangs and barbarous cartels. Little realizing the nexus between this decades old prohibition and the resultant mayhem our politicians escalated the drug war to the point where the US now leads the world in the incarceration of our own people, far outdistancing South Africa under apartheid. Fjifty million arrests of non violent offenders for minor amounts of drugs, more than a trillion of our tax dollars "invested" in stopping the flow, widespread corruption of cops, border agents, prison guards, etc. Consider the horrible blow back of the drug war, then consider the fact that the drug war has never stopped even one child from getting their hands on drugs. What is the benefit? What do we derive that even begins to offset the horrors we inflict on ourselves by continuing to believe in the fairy tale of drug war?