Hasan's DC Colleagues: "Schizoid" "Psychotic" "Paranoid"

Nidal Hasan's DC Colleagues Asked: Is He Psychotic?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2009/11/nidal_hasans_dc_colleagues_ask.html

A question we first asked on The Two-Way last week and still ask is why was Major Nidal Hasan allowed to continue to treat military patients when his colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences had serious doubts about his behavior.

Reporting by NPR's Daniel Zwerdling suggests the answer is that inertia may have played a role, including an unwillingness to enter the bureaucratic and legal tangle that must be navigated before an Army doctor can be removed for cause. Political correctness perhaps also was involved.

And this was despite some number of his advisers and colleagues having profound questions about him, including asking themselves and each other if he was psychotic.

An excerpt from a web story by Daniel:

Starting in the spring of 2008, key officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences held a series of meetings and conversations, in part about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others last week during a shooting spree at Fort Hood. One of the questions they pondered: Was Hasan psychotic?

"Put it this way," says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole."

Another excerpt:
When a group of key officials gathered in the spring of 2008 for their monthly meeting in a Bethesda, Md., office, one of the leading -- and most perplexing -- items on their agenda was: What should we do about Hasan?

Hasan had been a trouble spot on officials' radar since he started training at Walter Reed, six years earlier. Several officials confirm that supervisors had repeatedly given him poor evaluations and warned him that he was doing substandard work.
Both fellow students and faculty were deeply troubled by Hasan's behavior -- which they variously called disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent, and "schizoid." The officials say he antagonized some students and faculty by espousing what they perceived to be extremist Islamic views. His supervisors at Walter Reed had even reprimanded him for telling at least one patient that "Islam can save your soul."

Participants in the spring meeting and in subsequent conversations about Hasan reportedly included John Bradley, chief of psychiatry at Walter Reed; Robert Ursano, chairman of the Psychiatry Department at USUHS; Charles Engel, assistant chair of the Psychiatry Department and director of Hasan's psychiatry fellowship; Dr. David Benedek, another assistant chairman of psychiatry at USUHS; psychiatrist Carroll J. Diebold; and Scott Moran, director of the psychiatric residency program at Walter Reed, according to colleagues and other sources who monitor the meetings.

NPR tried to contact all these officials and the public affairs officers at the institutions. They either didn't return phone calls or said they could not comment.

But psychiatrists and officials who are familiar with the conversations, which continued into the spring of 2009, say they took a remarkable turn: Is it possible, some mused, that Hasan was mentally unstable and unfit to be an Army psychiatrist?
This part of the Hasan investigation threatens to revive the Walter Reed scandal of 2007 in which the Washington Post exposed the inferior conditions some recovering wounded soldiers were made to live in and the way the system allowed many of them fall through the cracks.

Here's an inescapable question -- if Hasan was allowed to treat soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and other serious psychiatric conditions, are there other Army mental health professionals with troubling profiles who are being allowed to treat patients?

It's possible that the way Hasan was permitted to continue treating patients, despite all the concerns, was an aberration. But it will take more investigating by Daniel and other reporters, and perhaps by Congress before we can be sure one way or another.


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Heads up! Ft. Hood mass shooting
    ... >> is pretty renown to have lower standards than state medical licenses ... >> I am curious if Dr. Hasan was/is was board ... >> certified with the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.. ...
    (alt.true-crime)
  • Re: Heads up! Ft. Hood mass shooting
    ... Hasan, McCaul said, 3took a lot of advanced training in shooting.2 He ... is pretty renown to have lower standards than state medical licenses ... certified with the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.. ... Well.....the military often pays for the medical schooling, ...
    (alt.true-crime)
  • OT - now Im worried....
    ... Robert Cone, the base commander. ... He said officials had not yet confirmed that Hasan made the comment." ...
    (alt.sports.basketball.nba.la-lakers)
  • Re: OT - now Im worried....
    ... Cone, the base commander. ... He said officials had not yet confirmed that ... Hasan made the comment." ...
    (alt.sports.basketball.nba.la-lakers)
  • Re: OT: Hasans Power Point Presentation
    ...  Fatts knows psychiatry better than psychiatrists who actually ... We can all agree that Hasan is a psychiatrist and certainly if he ... choses to pretend to be insane or answer all the questions to make ... believe he is insane, he can. ...
    (rec.music.beatles)