We honor those that have served and sacrificed for our country on Memorial Day. But let’s not forget the living. Serving in the the military is one of most noble acts an individual can perform and we have an obligation and duty to return that support by ensuring that those who served and are still serving in our military get access to the financial and medical assistance benefits that they deserve.
While Bill Moyers is too stridently anti-war in this clip, the part about the veterans coping with PTSD and mental health of our vets in an important one.
And in words, the St. Louis Dispatch editorial eloquently outlines the issue:
Disturbing new evidence emerged last week that the Department of Veterans Affairs continues to provide shoddy mental health care for soldiers and Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lack of effective screening, delayed care and denied diagnoses add up to a new kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that is completely unacceptable.
• A federal report released last September criticized the VA for a “lack of early identification techniques” to detect veterans’ mental health problems.
• VA facilities around the country are short about 3,800 mental health workers, including 1,400 doctors. Professionals at many facilities are working overtime, yet returning veterans continue to face long waits for services and even longer waits for diagnosis and benefits.
According to documents filed in a federal suit in San Francisco, more than 85,000 veterans faced a wait of longer than 30 days for mental health care as of April. Waiting times for decisions relating to service-connected disability compensation stretch into years.
• Repeated deployments to a war zone where there are no front lines have led to an overwhelming need for care. A RAND Corp. report released this month estimates that as many as one in five servicemen and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression. With 1.64 million deployed so far, that puts the number of veterans in need of care at about 300,000.The latest evidence that they’re not getting the care they need came in an e-mail released last week. It was written by Norma J. Perez, the PTSD coordinator at a VA facility in Texas.
Because the facility is seeing more of what Ms. Perez described as “compensation-seeking veterans,” she urged mental health professionals there to “refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) straight out.”
A diagnosis of PTSD would qualify veterans for lifetime medical care, instead of the five years made available to all combat veterans. And it would make them eligible for at least some disability compensation.
Instead of diagnosing PTSD, Ms. Perez asked that therapists “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder, R/O (ruling out) PTSD.” Veterans with adjustment disorder generally are not eligible for disability payments.That callous disregard of veterans’ rights is of a piece with the administration’s entire approach to war. It sent troops into combat with inadequate body and vehicle armor, issued so-called stop-loss orders that forced them to serve beyond the expiration dates of their contracts and repeatedly sent them to combat zones.
They came home to discover that the benefits and care they were promised either were not available or required extended and expensive waits. Even worse, the military and VA have tried to “manage” reality by denying it.
In April, lawyers for a veterans’ advocacy group released e-mails written by Dr. Ira Katz, chief of mental health at the VA. Under a subject line of “Shhh,” Dr. Katz revealed that the number of suicides by returning veterans was far higher than the VA publicly had acknowledged. He fretted about the implications if the real numbers — 1,000 suicide attempts a month — got out.
It’s not the public reaction to 12,000 suicide attempts a year or the cost of compensating servicemen and women for PTSD that should worry VA officials. It’s the fact that veterans, having already risked their lives in combat, are losing their futures to the unseen wounds of battles that ended long ago.
