Therapists Often Stressed Out Themselves

WASHINGTON - As Nidal Hasan lies in a coma and under guard in the hospital, closer attention is being paid to therapists trying to help stressed out service members. They are often stressed out themselves.

Couple that with a shortage of mental health professionals in the military, and there's a growing problem, according to a 2007 military mental health task force. It's unclear what prompted Hasan's murderous rage at Fort Hood.

Relatives in the West Bank say he didn't want to go to war himself, but no one was able to predict what led to this week's deadly massacre. His uncle, Rafiq Ismail, says Hasan was "very quiet, very nice, never been upset, always smiled." Ismail says he was shocked to hear what happened, "'til now, we didn't believe that he did it. I mean it's not him."

The shootings came was the military has seen an alarming spike in suicides among military personnel, and a decline in the number of mental health therapists, who don't see combat themselves, a real concern for Patrick Campbell of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Associations.

He told FOX-5, "What we do know is we need more mental health providers and the strain on our military is pretty strong. If we don't get them the help they need, it's like a stress fracture. The more running you do on it, the worse the injury gets."