Froede-Larkin Traumatic Brain Injury Reform Initiative – Connecting Vets

This year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is going to include important reforms in how military service members are treated for Traumatic Brain Injuries, including the scarring created on the human brain when exposed to improvised explosive devices, explosive breaching techniques, or from firing mortars, artillery, and high caliber weapons. The new verbiage in the NDAA this year will be due to the advocacy of several families whose service member took their own life after suffering from TBI.

"Frank Larkin and I are a part of this club that nobody wants to belong to where we had service members from Special Operations die by suicide after their histories of traumatic brain injury and blast exposures, Dr. Kate Rocklein told Connecting Vets.

Rocklein is the ex-wife of Michael Froede, who was an Army human intelligence professional who took his own life in 2019 while serving in a secretive intelligence unit. He had been suffering from undiagnosed mental health issues since he was caught in an IED blast nearly ten years before while serving in the Infantry. Frank Larkin is the father of the late Ryan Larkin who served as a Navy SEAL for four deployments and took his life in 2017 likely due to an undiagnosed traumatic brain injury as he has served as an explosive breacher.

Rocklein spoke in frustration about how slow the military responded to the seriousness of traumatic brain injuries.

It didn't really seem to matter which kind of strategy the Department of Defense had put forward, it didn't seem to be able to overcome the culture and so one of the first things that we had to acknowledge is that of institutional inaction or institutional betrayal, I focused mostly on institutional betrayal as that being a precursor to suicide, she said.

One aspect she hopes to see addressed in the upcoming NDAA is how institutional betrayal of service members suffering from mental health issues are often ostracized by their units.

We have to repair the mistrust and the negligence, honestly, with which many service members have been treated, to get this back on the right track, to course correct," she said. "That will immediately prevent suicides as well.

The new language to be included in the upcoming NDAA will also address treatment options for TBI, Rocklein hopes.

There's a couple 100 operators going to Mass General [Massachusetts General Hospital]now for complete comprehensive TBI treatment, and they're doing phenomenal so Mass General is doing what the military should have been doing for the last 20 years, Rocklein explained. But programs like home base where it's Department of Defense funded but the actual care and treatment and assessment is kind of out their hands and then these soldiers have been returned to their units pretty much fully functional, she said.

If codified into the upcoming NDAA, service members would be fast-tracked into treatments clinically proven to work with TBI patients such as the stellate ganglion block. If it's ketamine that looks like it might be clinically effective in a specific case then maybe they will get that. It's more precise medicine, she said.

Rocklein, who has a Ph.D. in nursing statistics, says that we don't need more data or more science to begin serious treatment of TBI patients. Now it's time to cut through the red tape.

"It's the first federal initiative that's calling for this level of reform and redirection, she says of what is currently called the Froede-Larkin Military Suicide and Traumatic Brain Injury Reform Initiative. It's led by two military spouses who became scientists to do this very thing," Rocklein said.

Much of the language in the initiative already has support from the armed services committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

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Froede-Larkin Traumatic Brain Injury Reform Initiative - Connecting Vets