Invisible Battles: Military Toxic Exposures and Health Provider Roles

Photo courtesy of U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs

The intersection of military service and environmental exposures has become an increasingly critical area of concern. Environmental factors affect the health and well-being of military personnel in complex and multifaceted ways, and ill and injured military veterans may find their high aspirations undermined by mental and physical ailments that significantly affect their quality of life.

This is the case for several of my family and friends, including my uncle, a veteran from the era of Desert Shield/Desert Storm, who has suffered for years because of the effects of environmental and other exposures while in the military.

A direct strike against health and wellness.

Many veterans say that they had a picture-perfect bill of health before exposure to environmental hazards during military service. Here is a glance at some of the exposures that service members faced in recent decades while in a garrison or on deployments to conflict zones.

Exposures and health impacts on service members:

2024-01-08T10:35:25-05:00January 8th, 2024|environmental health, Nursing|0 Comments

A Day to Honor Our Veterans Who Have Served

Today, on Veteran’s Day, AJN would like to honor all of those who have served in the U.S. military, including the 19 million who served during at least one war. This of course includes all those nurses who have served in the armed forces.

Veterans’ health care.

Nurses in every care setting, from hospital to primary care clinic, may encounter veterans, and it’s important to be aware of particular health concerns that may affect them. Please visit our collection of articles on the military and veterans’ health care, which will be free for the next week.

Topics in the collection include, among others:

  • caring for families with deployment stress
  • screening for posttraumatic stress disorder
  • enhancing veteran-centered care
  • traumatic brain injury.

While some of the articles are older, they are still pertinent today. We honor and thank all those who have served.

(Photo credit: Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash.)

2021-11-11T10:50:27-05:00November 11th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments

Revisiting Psychedelic Drugs for Therapeutic Use

Renewed interest in psychedelics to treat depression and PTSD.

An MDMA therapy session is conducted by researchers Marcela Ot’alora, MA, LPC, and Bruce Poulter, MPH, RN. Photo courtesy of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

As the saying goes, “everything that’s old is new again,” and that apparently applies to the exploration of using psychedelic medications as part of mental health therapy. That’s the topic of one of our feature articles in the June issue.

When I was an ED nurse in the early 1970s, we often saw patients who were brought in because they were on a “bad trips” from illicit use of psychedelic drugs: acid (LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide), but also mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine, a hallucinogen derived from the peyote plant), or “magic mushrooms,” which contained psilocybin.

While these drugs were used in in psychiatric research as early as the 1950s (see the AJN article from 1964, “Supporting the Patient on LSD Day,” free until the end of June), they were later banned for use in the 1970s under the Controlled Substances Act after they became popular illicit drugs in the counterculture […]

What Do Nurses Need?

Covid-19 Is ‘Probably Going to End My Career’” is the title of my recent column in the New York Times. The nurse who made that statement spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because her hospital doesn’t like having nurses speak out. So—nurses are afraid to publicly complain about their difficulties on the job, struggle with a lack of PPE and short-staffing, and are overwhelmed by the number of deaths they are seeing. All this has led to the nursing profession being in crisis.

The six ideas below could help nurses drowning in difficulties imposed by Covid find their way back to solid ground.

  1. Staffing legislation. This could mean ratios, or some other way to insure that nurses are not expected to work short. The legislation should also require robust nursing float pools and keep secretarial and nursing assistant support at their usual levels. Units have to be staffed in a way that maximally benefits patients, not just to help balance a hospital’s bottom line.
  2. Mental health support. Nurses as a group are not always open to counseling, but during Covid nurses have spoken out about the emotional toll of the work and their ongoing PTSD. They have recognized their need for mental health support. Hospitals must give nurses health insurance that covers individual counseling, and have mental health resources available on the job for nurses. “Covid broke me” is being said by too many nurses, too often.
  3. […]

2021-03-05T09:52:27-05:00March 5th, 2021|COVID-19, Nursing|1 Comment

Addressing Clinician Mental Health and Suicide Risk During the Pandemic

Pandemics are known to cause panic disorder, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, and posttraumatic stress. Depression can lead to suicide if not treated, yet is a treatable disease. We have seen nurses die by suicide during this pandemic in Italy.

Past experience suggests that health care workers exposed to the stress of the pandemic will need help long after the pandemic is under control.

I am serving as co-chair of the Strength Through Resilience task force of the American Nurses Association, whose focus was originally to collate resources to reduce suicide among nurses. We quickly shifted gears when the pandemic hit to collate resources to optimize resiliency and mental health among nurses in relation to the projected impact of the pandemic. Curiously, these resources are virtually identical. The ANA has posted initial resources as part of their Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation campaign and is and building more resources as quickly as possible.

Nurses already at higher suicide risk.

The added stress of the pandemic is particularly problematic because of evidence that emerged before the pandemic that nurses were at higher risk of suicide than the general public. If leaders at health care organizations have not already started proactively screening […]

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