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Annual Salute to Military Program
November 10, 2016 at 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
Guest speaker: Kris Peterson, M.D., COL (RET), MC
Please join us in welcoming over 55 veteran and active duty personnel and guests to our program!
Dr. Kris Peterson (COL RET) was deployed to Iraq in 2003. He was the senior psychiatrist deployed at the beginning of the war. He ended up traveling from Southern Iraq to the very North of the Country as the war unfolded. He experienced the highs and lows of combat from a provider/physician psychiatrists point of view. He shares his experiences of the highs of camaraderie and working to help others in stressful circumstances to the lows of seeing people hurt physically and emotionally. Dr. Peterson returned to Iraq in 2011 with his experiences ‘book ending’ the war in Iraq. He will share slides of his tours in combat and talk about his experiences and relationships developed there in country. He is an expert in treating PTSD and will briefly talk about some of the treatments being used to combat this illness and support our Soldiers.
Biography:
Dr. Peterson attended the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York for his undergraduate degree. Graduating from West Point he then went to the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda Maryland for medical school. He worked as an intern and resident in Psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. He went on to complete a fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
In the Army, Dr. Peterson has served as the Division Psychiatrist in South Korea with the Second Infantry Division. He was later assigned to his hometown in Tacoma at Madigan Army Medical Center. There, he started the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry program and moved on to become the Chief of the Department of Psychiatry at Madigan for over seven years. He served as the regional psychiatry consultant for the Western Regional Medical Command, the Child Adolescent Psychiatry Consultant to the Army Surgeon General and the Chair of the Military Issues Committee in the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
He served two tours in Iraq one in 2003 with the 101st Airborne Division and the other in 2011 in Tikrit Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division. He has significant understanding and focus for those who struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or suffer the ramifications from numerous family separations publishing articles in Psychiatry Journals as well as writing book chapters on the topics.
Dr. Peterson retired as an Army Colonel in 2012 and now works at Touchstone Life Center PLLC in Lakewood, Washington.
