Tragedy at Ft Hood Texas

[Elaine]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who opened fire Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 30 others before being shot to death, was classmate of Arthur’s in medical school. Arthur did not know him, does not remember him. Like the rest of America we are simply stunned by what has happened. Though we did not know Hasan, we know people who knew him, and we know people who knew at least one of his victims. Some details of what the press have reported so far are wrong. And as most might suspect, this is a complicated and very sensitive situation. About half an hour ago a motivated reporter for the Houston Chronicle called us. She’d gotten Arthur’s name from some medical board listing. I was thinking that it is odd how the press acquires information… it is odd how data is collected that eventually makes it to print (where the data becomes fact).

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this tragedy and their families.

[Elaine]

So, the news now says that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was captured alive... and that he may have been acting out of concerns over being deployed. Arthur has deployed twice, we have both experienced the fear of deployment... I understand the fear. And we know the culture at USUHS (the medical school Hasan graduated from). Arthur even worked briefly at Walter Reed.

We do not know Hasan, but we shared a similar path. When he made the comittment that the military pay for medical school, there was no dialogue about a war in Iraq. For many of the USUHS students, this was simply a way to pay for a medical education. The expectation was that there would be the inconvenience of a few years of payback… as a medical doctor in a base hospital some place, but deployment in war time was not a serious consideration. Before attending USUHS Arthur had over 15 years of military service, first in the Marines, then the Navy, and then with the Air Force. He was prepared and had a real sense of the commitment he was making. My impression was that many of his classmates did not. In fact, many of Arthur’s class mates had no military experience at all prior to medical school. They did not understand the military at all and seemed unaware of what they had committed to. When they made the agreement with the military, we were a country at peace, but that all changed dramatically after 9/11.

I realize that we can only know this from our perspective, but having just come from the University of Washington, Arthur and I found the atmosphere at USUHS to be – dare I say- warm and fuzzy. The school was small, for the most part people knew and cared about each other… there was an emphasis on family (many of the students were married with young children). Being an older student, and given that we were very involved in horses and dogs, we did not socialize all lot with Arthur's classmates, however, my dear friend, wife of Arthur’s classmate, did. My sense was that USUHS was about as warm, friendly and collegial as any academic setting could possibly be. It seemed to me that the student body was a representative mix of gender and ethnicity. Again, it’s hard to imagine that Hasan fell through the cracks.

No one can walk in the shoes of another, but if Hasan was dealing with PTSD at Walter Reed, he’d probably heard horror stories that would cumulatively be very hard to process. I think society forgets that we are at war… and there are all sorts of consequences to war… for the individuals involved. I also think that psychiatry (and psychology) fall short of the ability to assess and treat. I don’t think Hasan just popped out of bed yesterday with the desire and intention of killing and harming people. There had to have been problems for years… problems that people close to him were ignoring. This might be a good time to look around and see if there are people close to us screaming for help, before they hurt themselves and others.

As for Hasan, I sometimes wonder if there is anything at all that is credible about psychiatry. Arthur had a class at USUHS (which was required, so Hasan would have had to have taken it also), taught by a psychiatrist, that was focused on, for lack of a better phrase, mental health issues of the students. I wonder how Hasan even got through that class. It’s hard to imagine that this guy was flying under the radar all these years, as a professional in the very profession and professional context that should have identified him as a danger to himself and others. Tragic as this situation is, I think the story here is about why this wasn’t prevented by the profession and professionals that Hasan dealt with on a daily basis.