Military

VA In San Diego Addresses Shooting At Fort Hood

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published November 6, 2009 at 3:10 PM PST

This story was published more than 15 years ago.

Therapists at the VA Medical Center in La Jolla are responding to questions about how a trained psychiatrist could have been responsible for the shooting at Fort Hood Army base.

The suspect in the Fort Hood shooting, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, is a licensed psychiatrist who had never deployed, but was practicing at the Army Medical Center on base.

Sonya Norman is Program Director of the VA Medical Center’s PTSD Clinic for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. She says PTSD is not a condition that can develop simply from interacting with others who have it.

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"There’s been studies on this on whether someone could develop PTSD by hearing the stories, by seeing them on TV," she said. "People can get upset, but no they can't actually develop PTSD."

Norman says the VA Medical Center is planning a meeting next week for vets and family members left shaken after what happened at Fort Hood.

Military

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.