A friend who works for McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) alerted me to an important report that has gotten lost in the furor over Anna Nicole Smith’s death and the furor over Doug Feith. Vets with mental health issues and our broken V.A. system can’t compete with a dead blonde or a political scandal. After all, by definition, vets are just ordinary people who volunteered for the nasty jobs they do, and pay for it with mental anguish and maimed bodies (I’ve heard a few otherwise decent Kossacks imply they deserve what they get because they are volunteers in an illegal and immoral war—fortunately, they are a tiny minority and their cruel comments are quickly hidden from view so our military family members are spared reading them). The report is an in-depth look at how poorly equipped the system is to deal with the results of a war where 25% of soldier report PTSD symptoms—and many are medicated with drugs that require careful monitoring and then sent back to the fight. To put it bluntly, the state of our Veterans’ Administration hospitals is a national disgrace. Thank you, George Bush and the 12 years of GOP Congress who broke it by chrnoic underfunding.
A link to the full article here:
http://www.realcities.com/...
The story opens with the account of Tim Bowman, a young man who’d been home from Iraq for all of 8 months, who put a gun to his head and killed himself.
Once a fun-loving, life-of-the-party type, Bowman had slipped into an abyss, tormented by things he'd been ordered to do in war.
"I'm OK. I can deal with it," he would say whenever his father, Mike, urged him to get counseling.
Even if Bowman had sought help. He’d have faced an overburdened and underfunded V.A. system.
According to the report 1.4 million Americans have served in Iraq, Afghanistan or other places in the war on terror. That’s a lot of returning vets, folks. A LOT. And the V.A. system can’t cope with the demands placed upon it, despite V.A. Secretary James Nicholson’s claims to the contrary.
• Despite a decade-long effort to treat veterans at all VA locations, nearly 100 local VA clinics provided virtually no mental health care in 2005. Beyond that, the intensity of treatment has worsened. Today, the average veteran with psychiatric troubles gets about one-third fewer visits with specialists than he would have received a decade ago.
• Mental health care is wildly inconsistent from state to state. In some places, veterans get individual psychotherapy sessions. In others, they meet mostly for group therapy. Some veterans are cared for by psychiatrists; others see social workers.
And in some of its medical centers, the VA spends as much as $2,000 for outpatient psychiatric treatment for each veteran; in others, the outlay is only $500.
• The lack of adequate psychiatric care strikes hard in the western and rural states that have supplied a disproportionate share of the soldiers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - often because of their large contingents of National Guard and Army Reserve troops. More often than not, mental health services in those states rank near the bottom in a key VA measure of access. Montana, for example, ranks fourth in sending troops to war, but last in the percentage of VA visits provided in 2005 for mental health care.
Moreover, the return of so many veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan is squeezing the VA's ability to treat yesterday's soldiers from Vietnam, Korea and World War II. And the competition for attention has intensified as the vivid sights of urban warfare in Iraq trigger new PTSD symptoms in older veterans.
"We can't do both jobs at once within current resources," a committee of VA experts wrote in a 2006 report, saying it was concerned about the absence of specialized PTSD care in many areas and the decline in the number of PTSD visits veterans receive.
"There are VA facilities that were fine in peacetime but are now finding themselves overwhelmed," said Steve Robinson, government relations director of the Washington-based advocacy group Veterans for America. "So they're pitting the needs of the veterans of previous wars against the needs of Iraq veterans."
The V.A. is particularly failing National Guard and Reserve soldiers like Tim Bowman, the young vet who committed suicide. His father put it this way:
Tim always referred to the National Guard soldiers as the Army's disposable soldiers," his father, Mike Bowman, said. "Six months of training to kill, 12 months of the nastiest duty in Iraq and then two weeks that the Army gave them to be re-educated back to civilian life.
"It's not humanly possible to readjust to civilian life with that type of treatment," he said.
Part of the problem is the way the current V.A> system is run. Instead of large regional hospitals providing expensive in-patient care, the agency has moved towards smaller clinics and seeing patients on an out-patient basis, which is much cheaper. Congress, concerned about combat stress, ordered the V.A. not to skimp on mental health care for returning vet, because the emphasis on primary care programs could make mental health programs the victim of deep budget cuts. The result was a lot of bureaucratic infighting that has left the agency and its clinics poorly equipped to deal with vets returning with PTSD and other mental illnesses. Between 1995 and 2006, the number of visits a mentally ill vet gets has dropped from 117 per year per vet to 8.1. The system was already strained from, providing care for vets from previous wars when it suddenly had to deal with an entirely new crop of veterans from this war. Even the V.A. now admits it cannot continue to help the veterans of past wars and cope with returning soldiers from the current conflict.
I urge every Kossack to read this disturbing article—and write and call your representatives to do something about this shameful situation. If the stories it contains don’t move you to tears of fury at the Decider who hasn’t had the decency to attend even one funeral and whose visits to V.A. hospitals have been rare and only when he needs a photo op to counter bad press, I don’t know what will.
And the returning soldiers are discouraged from seeking help by a military community which regards a sane reaction—PTSD-- to an insane situation—war. You are supposed to tought it out. Real men,. Real soldiers don’t crack under combat stress (except they do)
At the end of his leave, Tim didn't want to go back to Iraq, but he didn't not want to go back, either. More than anything, he couldn't stand being away from his unit.
He returned home for good in March 2005. His deployment had included some mental health screening, but he told his father that it was "a joke." Soldiers coming off months of active duty would say anything during the screenings. "All they wanted to do was get home," his father said.
That was a feeling shared by Tim's commander in Iraq, Maj. Mike Kessel of Mahomet, Ill., who recently retired after 21 years in the Army National Guard. Two months before his unit returned home to Illinois, Kessel urged his bosses to change the demobilization process by letting the soldiers go home briefly before returning for health screening.
"I knew we were going to have problems," Kessel said. But his proposal was rejected.
"We got off the bus, we had a five-minute ceremony, and, boom, we were released," he said. "We didn't come back to drill for 110 days. Suddenly, your support system is gone. We had 120 people in 70 communities spread across five states."
In a 2004 study, nearly two-thirds of soldiers and Marines who met the criteria for mental health problems felt that seeking help would harm their careers, that they would been seen as weak, that superiors might treat them differently. One VA report from 2006 said that "any effort to reach out to these veterans and their families will face enormous obstacles"; it also said that the current system "follows an attitude of `ask, but don't tell.'" While every returning soldier is asked four important PTSD-related questions, "no one seems to expect them to answer truthfully."
At Tim's funeral, Kessel, his commanding officer, found that several other soldiers were having mental troubles, too - and having trouble getting into the VA.
"They were told, `We can't get you in for six months,'" Kessel said. "We started pulling a bunch of strings and making lots of noise, and then people started listening.
"But it was one soldier too late."
The statistics in the story are scary and horrifying. I’ve barely scratched the surface on here how bad the situation is. Not enough clinics, and not enough PTSD experts to fill them in is just the tip of the iceberg. Older vets are being shoved aside to deal with the emergency needs of their younger brethren. These men have paid a heavy price for fighting in a war that never should have happened. At the very least, we owe them first-rate medical help. I ask you all to read this report and take action on it ASAP.
Support the troops in the only way that really counts: bring them home and give them the help they need when they get here.