Last year, I had the opportunity to live and do research in the United States as a Fulbright scholar. I was there to conduct research on the ways in which the U.S. military was dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, in order to compare this approach with that of the Canadian Forces. As part of my activities at Brown University, I became a member of the Eisenhower Study Group, a team of economists, anthropologists, experts in political science and international relations, human rights activists, legal experts and journalists working together to assess the costs of the wars to the U.S., Iraq and Afghanistan, in both financial and human terms, not the least of which being the psychological impacts on veterans and soldiers returning from war. (The extensive resulting report can be found at www.costsofwar.org. See also Daniel Trotta’s “Cost of War at Least $3.7 Trillion and Counting.” Reuters, June 29, 2011...
Alison Howell is a research fellow at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Madness in International Relations: Psychology, Security and the Global Governance of Mental Health, recently published by Routledge.
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