To find out more about mental-health issues facing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, I interviewed John Bair, a clinical psychologist at the North Chicago Veterans Hospital.

(Full disclosure: He also happens to be my cousin’s father-in-law.)

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Q: What age groups do you mainly work with at the VA hospital?
A: Well, we tend to have cohorts. We’ve got a small cohort of World War II veterans, a very large cohort of Vietnam-related and Vietnam-era, which probably is the largest percentage of people we work with now. And we have some Korean vets and then a number of vets from special, smaller operations, from Grenada to Central America. And most recently we have the OIF, or the Afghan and Iraq veterans, and that’s of course burgeoning in the last couple years in our services at the VA.
Q: What’s the biggest issue facing those younger veterans?
A: There are three issues. The first issue is of course adjustment. Serving in a foreign country in war is a life-changing experience. It’s an adjustment to prepare, it’s an adjustment to serve, and it’s a big adjustment to return and try to re-enter the mainstream culture. And some percentage, somewhere between 15 and 25 percent may have post-traumatic stress disorder, and we see a number of people, more in this era, coming back with traumatic brain injuries. So we deal with adjustment, post-traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic brain injury.
Q: Can a traumatic brain injury maybe cause post-traumatic stress disorder or maybe cause other conditions?
A: It certainly is interactive with [it]. It’s very likely in prior wars, there was more traumatic brain injury that did not get diagnosed. We know so much more now about concussions from sports injury and sports medicine, research about how the brain can be concussed and sheared. And in Iraq, as you know … around half of the mortalities are due to IEDs, improvised explosive devices, so that means a lot of people are getting blown up. Secondary to that, among other injuries, is traumatic brain injury.
Q: If a young veteran comes back home and wants to go to college, where can he or she go for mental-health care or for support?
A: Many universities have fine counseling services. It’s our strong opinion that vets will do well to also be aware of the broad network of services provided by the Veterans Administration. It tends to be that when you serve in the military that you will do well working with facilities that specialize in veterans issues, like the VA.
Q: How can students and young adults reach out to their classmates and their friends who have served in combat?
A: Such a good question, and such an important question. So many vets come back, and while they may dress and look like any other college student, they are going through a major psychological adjustment. And they can’t really talk about it, and they don’t necessarily or they probably don’t want to talk about it. And if they do, it would be only very sensitively.
Q: What do you like about your job – about working with veterans?
A: It’s inspiring. It’s absolutely inspiring. There’s so many subsets of populations who have special needs that may be unspoken, but I think we simplify in our culture and in some ways underappreciate service in general but military service in particular. These young people coming back deserve our best effort to reintegrate. They put their foremost developmental years on the line for us, and we ought to be able to put our best efforts into helping them get readjustment counseling, mental-health services and whatever other benefits they need.