Elspeth Cameron Ritchie is a colonel in the US Army and holds a master's degree in both public health and medicine. She is an associate professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of Health Services and the psychiatry consultant to the US Army Surgeon General.
"When I was in college, I had no notion of joining the military," Ritchie says. "But I decided to go to medical school, and they paid for my tuition." In her presentation, Ritchie describes the experiences of women in the army, but does not speak for the US Army.
Although the public tends to focus on issues involving women who live and fight alongside men, Ritchie argues that "what is important to most women in the US military is how to juggle family and career while occasionally having to go to Somalia or Iraq for six to twelve months."
Ritchie comments on the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) discussion in Session I. She notes that PTSD has a range of symptoms (numbness, nightmares, hypervigilance) and is often accompanied by anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. In combat, Ritchie claims, men have a slightly higher rate of PTSD than women do. "The women are hanging in. This may be that women who choose to be soldiers are a fairly self-selected population, but many of us join the military for the money, and then stayed in."
Ritchie asserts that the Army is generally a comfortable place for women, who now make up 15 percent of the services. She then talks at length about her own experiences in and observations on the experience of soldiers more generally in the current conflict in Iraq. Her greatest concern for those without physical wounds is the re-entry into civilian life. The communities for returning soldiers, men and women, will be very important to their ability to reconnect.
In addition to PTSD, Ritchie notes, "there's also a range of deployment-related stress reactions, such as chronic irritability, bad dreams, helplessness, and difficulty connecting to friends and employers." She concludes, "what we are seeing is that people are engaging in more risky behavior six to twelve 2 months after they return." She finds that women with good community support are better able to reconnect with their families when they return from the war front.
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