Ilona Meagher | Bio
Ilona Meagher is an independent Illinois-based online writer, new media developer and author of Moving a Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops. After reading of a soldier's lost battle with PTSD in 2005, she decided to pursue the then under-reported topic.
It would change her life.
She is editor of the online journal PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within and lead researcher for the ePluribus Media PTSD Timeline, a comprehensive database of press- and independently-reported OEF/OIF PTSD-related incidents.
By all accounts, ePluribus Media, a citizen journalism initiative, is the only group tracking cases of possible, probable or confirmed reports of post-combat reintegration difficulties, making them publicly available for further research, study and reporting.
The PTSD Timeline has been used by government bodies such as the House Veterans Affairs Committee and Senator John Kerry’s office, dozens of media outlets, researchers, journalists and veterans organizations.
A former 15-year domestic and international flight attendant with a major air carrier who shifted to new media design and development beginning in 2002, Ilona is a citizen journalist for ePluribus Media and an occasional writer for General Wesley Clark’s Clark Community Network Troops & Vets series on PTSD.
She is also a columnist for her college paper, the Northern Star.
Co-authoring the three-part series, “Blaming the Veteran: The Politics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” with D.E. Ford, MSW, and retired Naval Commander Jeff Huber, since 2005, Ilona has contributed over 100 online commentaries on the topic of combat PTSD/reintegration to various online communities, most significantly ePluribus Media and Daily Kos.
In the spring of 2006, Ilona’s work drew the attention of New York publishers Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson, owners of Ig Publishing. In April 2006, they offered her the chance to write a book on the plight of our returning veterans. Her completed work, Moving a Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America’s Returning Troops arrived in stores in May 2007.
Following the book's publication, Ilona embarked upon a national book tour; took part in conferences (in August 2007 she appeared on a panel Panel members addressing questionswith General Wesley Clark and OEF/OIF veterans and in September 2008 appeared on a panel with IL Veterans Affairs Director Tammy Duckworth) and book fairs; visited and donated books to Walter Reed Army Medical Center; and continued to be interviewed by both local and national media (in November 2007 she appeared alongside National Center for PTSD Executive Director Matthew Friedman, MD).
In the summer of 2007, she also received a call from presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich lauding her work and was sought out by Warner Independent Pictures to assist with its Chicago preview screenings for the critically-acclaimed film In the Valley of Elah.
In December 2007, Ilona testified before Congress at a House Committee on Veterans' Affairs hearing, Stopping Suicide: Mental Health Challenges Within the Department of Veterans Affairs.
A bilingual first-generation American, Ilona's parents fled to the United States following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Her father is a veteran of both the Hungarian and U.S. armies, and in 1956 picked up arms against Soviet forces on the streets of Budapest for the cause of freedom.
She currently resides in the Rockford, Illinois, area with her husband, attending Northern Illinois University as an Honors student completing a degree in journalism. In 2008, she received NIU's "Illinois Journalist of the Year-Student" scholarship award.
