I come away just so impressed with Kellee Twiggs, the grieving, sympathetic widow of the late USMC Staff Sergeant Travis Twiggs, who passed away recently, one might say, from PTSD complications, after a long and difficult battle with that powerful adversary. Kellee was as much in the dark about the events immediately leading up to Twiggs' suicide as anyone else watching this painful scenario unfold; but she was and is very clear on the ravages PTSD took on her wonderful husband, who she dearly loved. There's been a great raw video interview footage on the Web for the last few days of Arizona tv reporter, Suzanne Kennedy, interviewing Kellee Twiggs about PTSD and her husband, Travis. Because it's unclear how long that video will stay on the Web, and also because so much of the Twiggs' story is worth knowing, I took the time to create a transcript of the interview, a downloadable copy of which is available here, Download transcript_of_kellee_twiggs_interview.pdf.
In the interview, Kellee Twiggs, who I very much hope has a future as a patient advocate, given what she's gone through, and how personally she knows the ravages of PTSD in a combat veteran's life, comes across very well -- as a kind, sympathetic, reasonable person, who ultimately feels that the Marine Corps did not do enough to save her husband's life (and that the current courses of treatment for PTSD -- at least the ones Travis was exposed to, with their emphasis on locked wards and overmedication with a slew of pharmaceuticals -- aren't the most effective treatments possible. From her vantage point, they were tried with her husband, and they just didn't work. Is her point of view that of a treatment professional? No. But it's very much as someone who loved her husband, and cared what he was going through -- and ultimately saw the system fail. One of the most interesting parts of the video to me was how she isolated the need to address the guilt that her husband felt, and was apparently unable to overcome, from letting others down. It's a very interesting video interview. Watch the entire clip, here; or read the transcript, linked above. And keep the Twiggs family in your thoughts and prayers this Memorial Day and after. It's hard enough to be a military family with a deployed servicemember. It's even harder to be a military family grieving a terrible, combat-related loss, as the Twiggs are presently.
