Battling the Storm Within Blog

As the Author of the #1 Amazon National-International Best Seller War Memoir “Battling the Storm Within” about living 20 years undiagnosed with PTSD, MST and the GWI. My mission is to empower others to address their own personal traumas, be healed, restored and live again. I believe in telling the truth, living the truth and being the truth. I will share the truth for it sets you free. I have battled my storm that was within me and won, so can you! Peace and blessings Sgt. Stephanie J. Shannon

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Veteran says women's military service deserves more recognition

In recent years, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), has been taken a lot more seriously. But, the general public is often not aware of the struggles returning veterans have with the disorder.

Stephanie Shannon is a veteran of Desert Storm and Desert Shield operations during the first Gulf War. She’s the founder and CEO of Michigan Women Veterans Empowerment and she joined Stateside to talk about how women who fight for our country deserve more recognition for their service.

Read more...
http://michiganradio.org/post/veteran-says-womens-military-service-deserves-more-recognition

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www.empowermiwomenvets.com
www.battlingthestormwithin.com

Fox2News - 2016 Tribute to our Troops: veterans who continue to serve

Since 2003, FOX 2 has honored the men and women who put their lives on the line for our country. Each year, our goal is to pay "Tribute to our Troops" from Michigan and with ties to the Great Lakes State. That tradition continues this year, as we honor our veterans who continue to inspire us, long after their service. We also focus on issues facing our veterans, including homelessness, PTSD and the unique battles for female veterans.

- Sgt. Stephanie Shannon, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War, shares her struggles during and after her service. She founded "Michigan Women Veterans Empowerment", an organization that offers support to female veterans.

‘Miracle’ PTSD Treatment Study Needs Volunteers

News

Dr. Jeffrey Tiede, Director of Landstuhl Regional Medical Center's Interdisciplinary Pain Management Center checks and ultrasound during a stellate ganglion block injection.

U.S. Army photo by Stacy Sanning

The single injection takes 30 minutes to complete, and patients report almost instant relief.

A treatment involving the injection of a local anesthetic next to a bundle of nerves in the neck has eased post-traumatic stress symptoms in some patients in as little as 30 minutes with dramatic, lasting results.

Veteran commits suicide in front of church service during police standoff

A suicidal man, being described as an Iraq war veteran, shot himself outside of an Idaho church on Sunday afternoon, Post Falls Police received a 911 call from the man, who said he was suicidal outside the Real Life Ministries church at 9:30 a.m.Upon their arrival, they discovered a man standing under the Church’s cross with a gun to his head, according to 12News.

Pentagon chief draws fire over 'dangerous' plan to relax military recruiting standards

Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s new proposal to relax the military's recruiting standards for fitness and body composition is fraught with potential problems both politically and practically, observers say.

Carter floated the idea during a speech in New York on Tuesday, suggesting current recruiting standards may be “overly restrictive” and result in the military rejecting people who have vital skills in foreign languages or in fields such as cyber security and intelligence analysis.

Read more..
http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/concerns-emerge-for-secdefs-proposal-to-relax-recruiting-standards

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www.empowermiwomenvets.com

Sgt. Shannon's radio interview with Talk show Host Paul Smith of Detroit's Opportunity Radio Show

Tune into Sgt. Shannon's radio interview with Talk show Host Paul Smith of Detroit's Opportunity Radio Show today @ 11am

Listen to interview

http://www.wjr.com/detroit/

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Direct Order" - Soldiers Ordered To Take Anthrax Vaccine & Got Brain Damaged

October 28, 2016

“DIRECT ORDER” An Award-Winning Documentary Tells the Story of Members of the Military who were Ordered Against their Will to Take the Controversial Anthrax Vaccine.

Federal regulators approved a plan by biotechnology company, VaxGen to test its experimental anthrax vaccine on about 100 people.

The human volunteers were injected with the experimental vaccine to see if it’s safe and produces the desired immune response.

VaxGen was awarded a $13.6 million federal contract to begin work on the anthrax vaccine. The company is applied for two more anthrax vaccine contracts. The contracts were awarded for advanced testing and manufacturing of 25 million doses.

Read and View

http://www.oye.news/documentaries/direct-order-full-documentary-anthrax/

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LAUNCHING: Our Voices United: Women Veterans Break Silence Vol. 1

Our Voices United: Women Veterans Break Silence Vol. 1 book is now available on Amazon check it out!

For more information visit

www.empowermiwomenvets.com

Purchase book Off Amazon
www.amazon.com/Our-Voices-United-Vet…/…/ref=tmm_pap_title_0…

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Direct Order: Soldiers Ordered to Take Anthrax Vax That Caused Brain Damage- VIDEO

“DIRECT ORDER” An Award-Winning Documentary Tells the Story of Members of the Military who were Ordered Against their Will to Take the Controversial Anthrax Vaccine.

Federal regulators approved a plan by biotechnology company, VaxGen to test its experimental anthrax vaccine on about 100 people. The human volunteers were injected with the experimental vaccine to see if it’s safe and produces the desired immune response.

Watch more...
http://www.oye.news/documentaries/direct-order-full-documentary-anthrax/

Our Voices United: Women Veterans Break Silence Vol. 1 book is now available on Amazon check it out!

https://www.amazon.com/Our-Voices-United-Veterans-Silence/dp/1539378101/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1477973318&sr=8-1

Veterans Can Get All Of These Prescription Drugs To Treat PTSD, But Not Weed- VIDEO

Around the nation, thousands of veterans and active-duty military personnel are waging their own personal battles against post-traumatic stress disorder. Typically triggered by a horrific incident either witnessed or experienced by the person, PTSD comes with a debilitating set of physical and psychological symptoms.

Ten women graduate from the Army's first integrated infantry officer course

Ten of the 12 women who this spring took their first step to becoming infantry officers graduated Wednesday at Fort Benning, Georgia, according to an Army release.

The officers were part of the first gender-integrated class of the 17-week Infantry Basic Officer Leaders Course, which takes freshly commissioned lieutenants and prepares them to receive their blue infantry cords.

"This is a process," Lt. Col. Matthew Weber, IBOLC's commander, told reporters Wednesday morning. "The training of an infantry lieutenant is a process until they step in front of that rifle platoon, and this is but the very first step in that process."

The women were a dozen out of 166 total in the latest class. They will now move on to follow-on training such as Ranger school, Airborne school, the Stryker Leader Course and the Mechanized Leader Course before receiving their first assignments, Weber said. The pipeline takes about a year.

New Study Links Chemical Alarms to Negative Brain Changes

(91outcomes.com) - Newly released study results suggest that 1991 Gulf War exposures that triggered chemical alarms damaged veterans' brain structure and function.

The study results, published this month in the peer-reviewed Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, looked at 1991 Gulf War veterans' self-reports of hearing chemical alarms going off during the war. Previous estimates have suggested chemical alarms sounded tens of thousands of times across the Gulf War theater of operations during the six-week war to oust Iraqi military occupying forces from Kuwait.

A pair of studies in 2012 by Dr.'s James Haley and James Tuite provided new evidence that supports that chemical plumes from destroyed Iraqi chemical warfare production and storage facilities drifted down over and exposed large numbers of Gulf War troops to low-levels of sarin, mustard, and other Iraqi chemical warfare agents.

These latest findings were written by cognitive neuroscientist Linda Chao, PhD, who has a long track record of Gulf War-related research and peer-reviewed publication funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Read more...
http://www.91outcomes.com/2016/10/new-study-links-chemical-alarms-to.html

GAO says Pentagon needs to do more about burn pit exposure

Provided by Julie Tomaska

The burn pit at the air base in Balad, Iraq, burned 24 hours a day, seven days a week and included materials such as Styrofoam, metals, plastics, and medical waste, kept burning with jet fuel.

The Pentagon needs to study the long-term health effects of exposure to the chemicals inhaled from burn pits at its overseas military bases, the Government Accountability Office says in a report.

While the report, released in September, credited the Department of Defense with improving practices to mitigate the risks of exposure to the burn pits, the department still needs to ensure that “research specifically examines the relationship between direct burn pit exposure and long-term health issues.”

11 Things People Don’t Realize You Are Doing Because Of Your Depression

For anyone suffering with this devastating mental illness, know you are not alone and you are stronger than you think. Please seek professional help if you are feeling helpless. There is aways, always hope.

1. You do everything you can to try to hide the fact that you have it.

When you have depression, you try to convince yourself that you are completely fine. You put on a fake smile wherever you go and your friends envy your enthusiasm and energy that you always seem to have. But inside? You feel drained, lost and terribly sad.

More Women Veterans Living on the Streets, Including in Milwaukee

Rochelle Lopez is an Army veteran who found herself homeless in Milwaukee after serving two tours in Iraq.

Rochelle Lopez lived in her car in the Milwaukee area for six months after serving two tours of duty in Iraq. Her story is not unique. Female veterans are now the fastest-growing segment of America’s homeless population.
On any given night in the United States, nearly 40,000 veterans are homeless. That's according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. A 2014 study from Disabled American Veterans found that eight percent of those homeless veterans are women.

Lt. Col. Patricia Jackson-Kelley Named to Veteran’s Advisory Commission

As a

Veteran of the U.S. Air Force and Air Force, Army and Navy Reserves, Lt. Col. Patricia Jackson-Kelley knows how tough life in the military can be for women. Women make up about 17 percent of the veteran population in the U.S. and are growing in the ranks of the homeless. After they serve, they face many of the challenged faced by male counterparts, including low wages, banks that are unwilling to lend them money for a home, lack of affordable housing and childcare and inadequate mental health services. However, women in the military are disproportionately affected by trauma caused by sexual assault. A recent study estimates that a slightly more than half of homeless women veterans were victims of sexual assault.

'It savaged my life': military sexual assault survivors fighting to become visible

Sexual assault within the ranks has reached shocking levels and while some awareness around female service members’ has belatedly begun, the 52% of male victims still struggle to get justice – and redemption

Annie Kendzior photographed at her family’s home in Southlake, Texas. Photograph: Allison V Smith for the Guardian

Squinting so he could drive through the vodka and the pills, Heath Phillips searched for a tree he could wrap his truck around.

It was a frigid February day in 2009, some 200 miles north-west of New York City, on a road Phillips drove every day to get to work. He describes this moment as his rock bottom, but it was not his first suicide attempt. Twenty-one years earlier, Phillips had first tried to kill himself aboard the ammunition ship USS Butte after his shipmates repeatedly raped him.

History-Making Air Force General Isn't About 'Firsts'

Gen. Darren W. McDew and Hillard W. Pouncy, original Tuskegee Airman, pin stars on then Maj. Gen. Stayce D. Harris, during a promotion ceremony Aug. 9, 2014 at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Ga. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Jaclyn McDonald)

Military.com | Oct 10, 2016 | by Oriana Pawlyk

It has been a big year for women in the military, as 2016 marked the first time women could apply to serve in all military occupations and positions and saw more female leaders hit occupational milestones.

Lt. Gen. Stayce Harris, a reserve pilot by trade, this year became the first female African-American to ever achieve the rank of lieutenant general for the Air Force, and earned the job of assistant vice chief of staff and director of the air staff for the service. She is also the first woman and the first reservist to return to active-duty to fill the position.

Military Veterans Are Finding Careers, Community, Purpose, and Treatment in the Cannabis Industry

“When I was in the military, cannabis was never a thought for me. It’s not an option and it’s very taboo,” says former Marine Captain and cannabis pioneer Ben Madden. “As you probably know, cannabis use is grounds for immediate dismissal from the service.”

When Madden was still active in the military, he was deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2011 with fellow Marine Aeron Sullivan, who later founded the online cannabis marketplace Tradiv. The two didn’t know it then, but around four years later they would be operating the world’s largest wholesale cannabis e-commerce platform together. The distribution platform connects cultivators, product manufacturers, and dispensaries in a streamlined and automated fashion. It’s essentially the Amazon for wholesale cannabis, but just for business-to-business (B2B) purposes.