Possible Causes of Increased Domestic Violence among Military Veterans: PTSD or Mefloquine Toxicity?

After more than a decade at war, our returning service members and their families are facing enormous amounts of difficulty when returning home. PTSD and TBI, the signature wounds of these wars, have been well covered in the media. The family struggles have remained hidden and mostly undiscussed. These families are facing very specific issues in military relationships like infidelity, substance misuse, and intimate partner violence; the latter of which military families are three times more likely to experience when compared to the civilian population. There is a potential effect on caregiver burden in the role of PTSD as a factor for relationship difficulties as well. Many times, spouses can struggle with no longer a being just a wife; they have become full-time, exclusive caregivers. This loss of personal identity is one of many things that can cause a cascade of mental health problems for the spouse. As much as spouses are excited to have their service member home, incorporating the service member back into the family can be stressful. Spouses may be taken off guard to find themselves experiencing deep sadness at the changes they perceive in their veteran. These are some of the more common relationship issues in a marriage where PTSD is present. Yet there seems to be a darker side to all of this. With the higher rates of domestic violence, this paper is researching the possibility of being wrong about PTSD or potentially there may be some previously unrecognized confounder that has not been looked at yet. Mefloquine is an anti-malaria pill given to our military members that is already known to confound the diagnoses of PTSD and TBI. This literature review will assess the difficulties that these veterans and family members are facing by looking at the different possibilities of what could be making veterans more violent

Educating Spouses May Be Key to Helping Veterans

Veterans’ and family members are facing great difficulties when the veteran returns home to transition into civilian life. Marriages are struggling, and families are being torn apart when the veteran returns home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Although there are many programs that have been created to educate spouses about PTSD, however, they often fall short of being able to prepare a family for the actual experience of transition. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is starting to come up with programs to help couples and research is starting to gain empirical support; there are still many couples left with no idea what to do. In a group already prone to higher rates of divorce, infidelity, and domestic violence, it is important to analyze every plausible explanation and treatment possible to make sure the best care is being given. This paper analyzes empirical literature on spouse’s perceptions, education on PTSD, and relationship dynamics. The results of this analysis, along with the creation of the PTSD Marriage Triangle and Couples Perception Grid, could pave the way for creating a proactive peer education course for spouses before they leave the military. That will give them a much better understanding of PTSD, perceptions, and creating a “we” united front in their marriage. This could have a positive impact both on the spouse’s mental and emotional health while improving their marriage by not letting it get to a dysfunctional state

Nutrient Management Approaches and Tools for Dairy Farms in Australia and the U.S.

Nutrient surpluses in industrialized nations like the U.S. and Australia are causing problems on dairy farms and posing a threat to the rest of the environment. This paper discusses tools that dairy farmers can use to manage the excess nutrients while continuing to meet demands and profit. The authors suggest improvements in these tools that will not only quantify the amount of nutrient balances on dairy farms, but also identify opportunities for enhanced nutrient use and reduced nutrient losses.Nutrient Management Tools, Australian Dairy Farms, U.S. Dairy Farms, Confinement-based Dairy Operations, Grazing-based Diary Operations, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Sod, tillage and fertilizers for the apple orchard--a ten-year summary, Bulletin, no. 190

The Bulletin is a publication of the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station, College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire

The effects of fertilizers in a cultivated orchard, Bulletin, no. 168

The Bulletin is a publication of the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station, College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire

Recent Trends in Horticultural Research

Author Institution: The Ohio State Universit

On positive solutions and the Omega limit set for a class of delay differential equations

This paper studies the positive solutions of a class of delay differential equations with two delays. These equations originate from the modeling of hematopoietic cell populations. We give a sufficient condition on the initial function for $t\leq 0$ such that the solution is positive for all time $t>0$. The condition is "optimal". We also discuss the long time behavior of these positive solutions through a dynamical system on the space of continuous functions. We give a characteristic description of the $\omega$ limit set of this dynamical system, which can provide informations about the long time behavior of positive solutions of the delay differential equation.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure