american morning the most news in the
morning period with day six eastern
alcohol and war have been long linked
for some time
we're starting to get a better idea of
who's most likely to abuse
and why that is you mentioned the
national guard reserve troops
a couple of common elements here seem to
be the witnessing of violence
people who witness violence either death
a physical abuse or some sort of maiming
those are the people who seem to turn to
alcohol the most even long
after they return from the war as you
mentioned again the reserve guard troops
are particularly
vulnerable to this so their numbers
really much higher it could be because
they haven't had the same training
as career military they have other jobs
which are far different
from their experience in the in the in
the war zone but young people as well
and that's defined as people born after
1980 were also very vulnerable take a
look at those numbers karen remarkable
seven times more likely to binge drink
again after returning
five times more likely to have alcohol
related problems so this is
more than just a slight blip this is a
very significant problem
from a medical standpoint karen i think
this is also important because
when it comes to ptsd post traumatic
stress disorder
one of the earliest warning signs might
be someone who's starting to abuse
alcohol
or abuse substances so this could be a
red flag to doctors and people in the
health community
that say look if there's an alcohol
problem here should we be probing a
little bit deeper to find out
if in fact this is representative ptsd
karen they call you know self-medicating
rather than going to a professional to
work through some of this
is there enough help available out there
you know it's a good question we've done
a lot of stories about that issue
this is a complicated problem to treat
if in fact it is alcoholism or substance
abuse
but it starts even earlier than that in
terms of obstacles there is still a huge
amount of stigma as far as we could tell
with actually going to a senior person
within the military and saying you're
suffering from ptsd
or you have some sort of substance abuse
problem so so taking care of the stigma
then increasing access overall are going
to be two obstacles that still need to
be overcome
and we're seeing more cases than ever
before so this is something that needs
to be dealt with rather quickly