Significant Injury: War, Medicine, and Empire in Claudia's Case

Abstract

[...] she simply forgot what she was told to do. Clinicians note how difficult it is to discern these symptoms from those suffered by veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, a syndrome that may emerge even among veterans who have not experienced direct violence but instead have been traumatized by the casualties and deaths of other soldiers in their units; by the psychological demands of being in stressful combat situations; or by the psychological damage caused by unrelenting and unprosecuted harassment, including, in the case of many women veterans, sexual assault by men in their units. [...] the twenty-five -member research team stressed that treating the growing numbers of combat-related TBI patients represented a formidable cost to the nation: the estimated cost of treatment for cases of mild TBI was between $27,000 and $33,000 per patient, and in cases of severe TBI, the amounts climbed to between $270,000 and $408,000 per patient.