War and Drugs: Veteran Battles Ep 3 – A Hopeful Future

Jay Russell: In my case, my faith helped me out, my family helped me out, my church helped me out, and that’s when I started realizing that there were options.

Even like the United Way helpline. I have lost track of how many people do not know the simple number 2-1-1 to get help and find a bed that will help them out or to talk to someone. The crisis hotlines to call when you feel like you’re going to hurt yourself.

There are so many options out there, even calling facilities like American Addiction Centers. I mean nobody is going to get turned away, and if I can’t get them into one of my programs I’m going to get them somewhere where they can get help.

The SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] website, you can type in your zip code at findtreatment.samhsa.gov, and it will pull up all the facilities in your 100-mile radius and you can break it down to find what you’re looking for—be it Medicaid or diagnosis, scholarship.

But most veterans aren’t even in the Veterans Choice Program. If they are not dishonorably discharged they can usually get in the VA choice program simply by calling the VA and going, hey, am I in this? No, I need to register. And then that opens up a whole new doorway. I’ve seen the VA program pay for people to go for 6 months to treatment and turn their life around.

Jay Russell: One of the treatments that worked for me that works with PTSD is called EMDR. The eye movement disassociation tactic or even bio sound chairs—we use those in a lot of our facilities.

The best way to describe PTSD for someone who doesn’t understand it is we all get nervous when someone tailgates us. I want you to imagine you’re on the highway and the person tailgating is so close you can’t even see their headlights. But guess what? It’s not a car, it’s a semi-tractor trailer with a full load. No matter how fast you turn, no matter which way you go, you cannot get this thing off your tail.

When you do EDMR and this disassociation tactic, it doesn’t get rid of these memories. But what it does is after a couple sessions now that semi is a quarter mile back, and then it’s a half mile back, and at some point, it may never get more than a mile back—it’s always there, you’re aware of it—but you’re able to function again.

Jay Russell: Going to a PTSD support group is something that is phenomenal as well. That’s why our company came up with our veterans programs. Being able to talk to someone else who is going through what you’re going through and dealing with what you’re going through takes away that fear of a stigma or a scarlet letter being thrown on you, and all those are offered in our programs and also by the VA at some point, much less counselors.

Mark Calarco: So, they’ve done some really interesting research and focus on the biological model, the medical model, about how you know PTSD affects neurotransmitter functions and things in the brain. And so a couple different medications are being used. One of them is called ketamine, are you familiar with that?

Dan Wagener: You mean like ketamine? Like Special K?

Mark Calarco: No, ketamine is a prescription medication well I don’t know (laughing) it’s a prescription medication it’s called ketamine. You know it seems to really help a lot of veterans who suffer from PTSD. Now the medicine, the medication is used as a sedative and has other functions outside of… so it’s been experimented with. It has a short half-life, but it does have some significant benefits. I mean when they do studies with it, it really shows significant improvements in their PTSD. So, there’s something going on obviously from a biological standpoint in the brain.

Mark Calarco: Modafinil is Provigil. They’re both made by the same company. Armodafinil is just a newer version of it, and it’s called Nuvigil. But they basically work very much the same way and they have very much the same indications. They’re used for sleep shift disorder, narcolepsy, and fighter pilots actually.

The thing about these two, we don’t exactly understand how they work to some degree but for narcolepsy and sleep shift disorder. But they really help in my—now this is my own personal experience that I’m talking about—they’ve really been beneficial in helping with cognitive function, energy, attention, focus, and other aspects, symptoms of PTSD when we’re treated with these.

Mark Calarco: Obviously, you still want to engage them in all the in the group and all therapy sessions, CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy or you know motivational interviewing, could be EDMR, all those things have a place and certain people respond really well so those should always be there and group therapy individual therapy sessions and things are extremely important for veterans coming in who are in recovery or are in a recovery program. But I think it’s important to emphasize that you do need to address the underlying neurochemical and neurophysiological issues that are going on that are fundamental to veterans especially if we know that addiction is a brain disease but we understand more and more that PTSD is also a brain disease, it’s not just a psychological issue. It causes very distinct biochemical neurophysiological changes in the brain of certain individuals. Some people are more susceptible than others and it’s probably related to genetics and other factors.

Mark Calarco: The Bridge device is a transcutaneous electronic device that you put on your ear, OK? And it has a 5-day battery and it has FDA approved for chronic pain but it was being used off label for withdrawal. And now just recently it was approved for that by the FDA, in fact.

So basically what it does it is—it’s very Star Trekkian it’s really cool—so what you do is you hook up this little device and you wear it like a hearing aid sort of bit and then you have a little bit of wires that go right underneath the skin by the ear.

We don’t know exactly how it works but it says an electromagnetic field goes into the brain, the deep brain, and it really does something, it helps people go through withdrawal without medication or in some instances they need minimum medication.

So, now how would that affect other psychological conditions like PTSD? I don’t think there’s any studies on that—we couldn’t say. But we do know that we can use … these are all part of energy medicine you know where people can have – you know about electroconvulsive therapy and things that people use for depression? Yeah, this is not like that because it doesn’t shock anybody it’s just…it’s very benign it doesn’t hurt but it really it’s using a sort of noninvasive, low as far as we can tell, low-risk way of helping people go into recovery.

Mark Calarco: So, the one concern about that though is that even if it does help them with PTSD let’s say …could you know, anything that stimulants the reward center in the brain could potentially increase the risk for relapse, right?

Dan Wagener: Yeah.

Mark Calarco: So that’s a concern with things like MDMA, MDE, MDEA, any of those. And that’s also an issue with amphetamine salts that are used for ADD. People come into recovery and they have a diagnosis of that you have to really confirm it because that can actually promote relapse. And even marijuana you know is a gateway drug for people who have the brain disease—not for other people but for that 10-15% of the population, and certainly for veterans who have the brain disease of addiction. It may help some of their symptoms, but it certainly can increase their risk for relapse.

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