McClatchy again on PTSD and the VA

Chris Adams of McClatchy News on VA & PTSD treatment nationwide

Mental health treatment provided to veterans varies widely
By CHRIS ADAMS
McClatchy Newspapers
HELENA, Mont. | Chris Dana came home from the war in Iraq in 2005 and slipped into a mental abyss so quietly that neither his family nor the Montana Army National Guard noticed.

He returned to his former life: a job at a Target store, nights in a mobile home across the road from his father’s house.

When he started to isolate himself, missing family events and football games, his father urged him to get counseling. When the National Guard called his father to say that he had missed weekend duty, Gary Dana pushed his son to get in touch with his unit.

“I can’t go back. I can’t do it,” Chris Dana responded.

Things went downhill from there. He blew though all his money, and then on March 4 he shot himself in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. He was 23 years old.

As Gary Dana was collecting his dead son’s belongings, he found a letter indicating that the National Guard was discharging his son under what are known as other-than-honorable conditions. The move was due to his skipping drills, which his family said was brought on by the mental strain of his service in Iraq.

The letter was in the trash, near a Wal-Mart receipt for .22-caliber rifle shells.

All across America, veterans such as Chris Dana are slipping through the cracks.

The ability of the Department of Veterans Affairs to care for veterans with mental ailments has come under increasing scrutiny. The agency says it is scrambling to boost its resources to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder, prevent suicides and help veterans cope. It has added mental health counselors and suicide-prevention programs.

But the experience in Montana, which by some measures does more than any other state to support America’s wars, shows how far the military and the VA have to go.

“The federal government does a remarkable job of converting a citizen to a warrior,” said Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat. “I think they have an equal responsibility converting a warrior back to a citizen.

“I can’t imagine that it’s only Montana that’s experiencing this,” Schweitzer added. “Our men and women are part of this country, and we have common experiences. It’s not as though the water we drink and the air we breathe in Montana make our experience completely different than everywhere else.”

McClatchy Newspapers analyzed a host of VA databases and records, and found that mental health treatment across the country remains wildly uneven. While mentally ill veterans in some parts of the country are well tended, those in other places — especially Montana — are falling by the wayside.

The records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, included all 3 million VA disability claims in the nation and 77 million medical appointments in the agency’s health system in fiscal 2006.

At a U.S. Senate committee hearing last summer in Great Falls, Mont., a top VA official touted the success of the department’s mental health operations in the region that includes Montana. But the agency’s records indicate that it ranks below most other regions in measures of access and success.

In fact, Montana veterans trail far behind their peers around the country on the two main VA functions:

•By several measures, the agency provides less specialized mental health care in Montana than in most other states. Veterans seeking to enter the mental health system at Montana’s only VA hospital had longer waits and received fewer visits than veterans did at almost any other VA hospital in the country.

•Recent veterans in Montana with mental ailments receive far lower payments, on average, from the VA disability system than veterans in almost any other state.

“When they were called to active duty, they were running a business, driving a truck, working at a mill, teaching school,” Schweitzer said. “When they returned from being a soldier, they didn’t go back to a military base. … They don’t have people they can talk to. They are 300 miles away from their detachment, and everybody where they work didn’t experience what they’ve gone through.

“In fact, nobody where they work experienced what they’ve gone through. Their family doesn’t understand it well.”


To reach Chris Adams, send e-mail to cadams@mcclatchydc.com.
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I am a big fan of Chris Adams work on veterans, he has been in the lead long before Anne Hull abd Dana Priest ever wrote about Walter Reed, he has been writing on the lack of healthcare and the extreme problems with the claims processing that many veterans have experienced I first became aware of his work in March 2005. He has earned my SALUTE

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