Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Dakota Meyer, while discussing last week's Fort Hood shooting on Fox News' Your World, told host Neil Cavuto that the immediate assumptions that disturbed veterans are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder unfairly stigmatizes all vets who deal with that condition.
The shooter, Spc. Ivan Lopez, was being evaluated for PTSD before perpetrating the attack last Wednesday, and Meyer warned against blaming his violence on that alleged diagnosis.
"I think with the way that PTSD is portrayed, what it does is it separates veterans, people who are suffering, more from the American public," Meyer said. "You know, every time something happens, it's like it's got to be PTSD. It sounds like this man didn't even see combat, so I think there needs to be a different label for a pre-existing mental health illness and PTSD that was caused because of combat. To be honest with you, it labels these veterans in a way to where somebody doesn't want to hire them, or all veterans are crazy, whatever they think when they think of PTSD, which is not true."
Cavuto asked Meyer to estimate how many returning soldiers suffer from PTSD. He called it a normal reaction to combat.
"You go to combat and you watch your friends die and you see these things that war brings, I mean if you don't have a reaction to it as far as dreams or depression or as far as something like that, I think those are the people we need to question," he said.