It's an intriguing and provocative name that translates to Web hits, phone calls and tour tickets: the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.

To some, the title acknowledges history by readopting one of the many names previously held by the long-vacant, 19th century mental institution known most recently as Weston Hospital.

But others say the new owners of the massive Gothic Revival hospital have gone too far, disparaging the suffering of former patients and reopening wounds with planned events like "Psyco Path" dirt bike races on the grounds.

They say words like "lunatic" and "retarded" have gone the way of "colored" and "Negro" and should never be resurrected.

"It's like turning back the clock to a time we don't want to go back to," said Ann McDaniel, executive director of the Statewide Independent Living Council, one of several groups to object. "I think they could still do what they want to do without being offensive."

If the three deaths were connected, no one on the island could say exactly how. The first, a 15-year-old, killed himself at his home near the high school in February 2007. The second, a 17-year-old ‘A’ student and an athlete, committed suicide last October.

The third, a 16-year-old found dead at home in January, may have been an accidental death, not a suicide. None had been good friends.

Yet they were all islanders, talented and well-liked students in a high school of 400 that had not had a suicide for more than 40 years.

The small year-round community on Nantucket Island, deeply shaken, turned to outside experts for help.

Suicides, family breakups, depression and social stigma are just some of the hidden legacies of the Iraq war among the more than one million US troops who have served in the campaign.

While nearly 4,000 American troops have been killed in the war and more than 29,000 have been wounded, those who escape physical injury still stand a high chance of developing psychological scars that may stay with them for life.

Some have watched comrades die or witnessed unspeakable carnage, while others may have found it hard to come to terms with the trauma of killing.

A report last month focused on the psychological toll on troops from the 10th Mountain Division> based in New York state, one of the most deployed brigades in the US Army since the September 11 attacks of 2001.

The study, by the group Veterans for America, found that the mental health care provided for soldiers did not meet the psychological burden they had suffered during repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Groundbreaking research suggests genes help explain why some people can recover from a traumatic event while others suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.

Researchers found that specific variations in a stress-related gene appeared to be influenced by trauma at a young age — in this case child abuse. That interaction strongly increased the chances for adult survivors of abuse to develop signs of PTSD.

Among adult survivors of severe child abuse, those with the specific gene variations scored more than twice as high (31) on a scale of post-traumatic stress, compared with those without the variations (13).

The worse the abuse, the stronger the risk in people with those gene variations.