But this time, as opposed to wars in the past, doctors know to look for the symptoms of PTSD as well as how to treat it.

“We feel we’re reaching a higher proportion of veterans than in the past,” said Antonette Zeiss, deputy chief consultant for mental health services at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Zeiss said she thinks more soldiers are seeking help because they know the services are available. During the Vietnam War, doctors and soldiers did not know to look for the symptoms of PTSD, which include flashbacks, nightmares, lack of emotions, difficulty sleeping and irritability.

Zeiss said 120,000 soldiers have sought health care, and that 31 percent of them are being reviewed for possible mental health disorders, the top diagnosed being PTSD. A big difference from previous wars, she said, is that 13 percent of those soldiers are women.

“We need to think not only about women veterans, but about women warriors,” she said.

Many of them, she said, have dealt with sexual trauma.

Soldiers are also living through trauma that, in previous wars, would have killed them, such as head wounds, Zeiss said. Doctors are just beginning to understand what those soldiers need.

“They’ve lived through something profound in terms of emotional experience,” Zeiss said. “How much rehab will they need?”

In Iraq, the Ministry of Health has worked to make sure doctors can help civilians deal with the same symptoms soldiers have, but Saddam Hussein’s government kept no records of mental health issues, and psychiatrists did not study specific areas, such as children’s mental health or forensics psychiatry, under Hussein’s rule, said Dr. Sabah Sadik, national adviser for mental health for the Iraq Ministry of Health.

Since the war, Sadik said health officials have kept records of mental health issues, encouraged people to participate in field research, begun a mental health needs assessment study, and begun two studies specific to PTSD. They have also begun integrating mental health into primary health care, trained 30 general practitioners in mental health issues, and talked with health care workers about ethical treatment of mental health patients.

“This is a probably a drop in the ocean for what Iraq needs,” Sadik said. “Iraq did not develop as much as the rest of the world over the last 30 years.”

Some of their work has become moot, though, as doctors continue to flee Iraq following threats from terrorists and the deaths of colleagues.

“With the ongoing violence, especially when intellectuals and doctors are targeted by terrorists, it has been a very difficult time,” Sadik said. “It is a huge problem we hope we’ll overcome.”