- Do you know how many troops have deployed, become injured, or even died so far? If you said 1.6 million you would be correct. Recent Pew Research reports that only 23% of Americans know this.
- With 1.6 million service personnel having served in Iraq or Afghanistan and one in three vets expected to suffer serious psychological problems including depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) says about 533,000 men and women are coming home with combat-related psychological injuries.1
- Nearly 37 percent (299,585) of our returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have received one form of medical treatment or another from their local Veterans Administration.
- About 40 percent of those patients (120,049) have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, 23 percent (67,717) with post-traumatic stress disorder. Studies show PTSD risk increases with multiple deployments.
- Army figures show soldiers serving multiple deployments are 50 percent more likely to suffer mental health problems.
- 663,000 veterans of all wars are waiting for their disability claims to be processed, the highest backlog on record.
- Hearing damage is the number one disability for today’s vets, with nearly 70,000 suffering from ringing in the ears and another 58,000 from hearing loss.
- Appx. five soldiers attempt suicide each day, up from one per day before the Iraq war started.
- One fifth of married soldiers in Iraq say they are planning a divorce. 2
- At least 40,000 Iraq and Afghanistan vets have been treated for substance abuse.
- Ten percent of soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan are women, among them some 16,000 single mothers
- Among military families shows that reports of emotional, physical and sexual abuse and child neglect peaked during the main deployment of troops to Iraq. When deployments began, reports of abuse quickly jumped from 5 in 1,000 children to 10 in 1,000.
