Catastrophe - Dick Morris [136]
Unfortunately, even when the Pentagon finds that servicepeople are suffering from PTSD, it does not always refer them for counseling. A 2005 study by the Government Accountability Office found that “only about one in five Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who screen positive for combat-related stress disorders are referred by the Pentagon for mental health treatment.”573
Fox News reports that many current and former government officials are concerned about the ability of the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration to handle the new flood of PTSD cases.
“We are not prepared for the body count we are seeing, mental health or otherwise,” said Sue Bailey, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs during the Clinton administration. “America’s mood is not prepared for this.”574
“The [Veterans Administration] is not geared up and the [Department of Defense] is not geared up,” said Rick Weidman, a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans of America. “That’s why some of us have been talking, and you are going to see a major front of veterans saying we need this fixed and we need this fixed now.”575
But just as soldiers are reluctant to report psychological trauma to their officers or even to the Veterans Administration, the VA itself has a palpable bias against taking mental issues seriously.
The Pentagon, facing the deadly increase in military suicides, seems to be doing better. It has set up Defense Department Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury under the command of Army Brigadier General Loree Sutton. The centers are designed to “establish quality standards for: clinical care; education and training; prevention; [and] patient, family and community outreach.”576 They are to be staffed by behavioral health consultants and nurses and will be open 24/7. The Pentagon says that the centers “can deal with everything from routine requests for information about psychological health and traumatic brain injury, to questions about symptoms a caller is having, to helping a caller find appropriate health care resources.”577
General Sutton’s office has also launched a program called Real Warriors, in which “service members can talk about and listen to the stories of those who sought help for psychological injuries or traumatic brain injuries.”578 By focusing on “the story of real warriors facing real battles both on as well as off the battlefield, with wounds both visible and invisible,” General Sutton hopes to stimulate soldiers and veterans to seek help and cope with their problems.
To show that PTSD is not some new fad, Real Warriors features the ancient Greek play Ajax by Sophocles, in which “a warrior who has been deployed for several years tries to kill his commanding officer, but ends up killing himself.”579
But the Veterans Administration itself is less sensitive to PTSD. President Obama’s budget request for the 2009–10 fiscal year increases Veterans Affairs spending by $15.1 billion, raising it from $97.7 billion to $112.8 billion.580 This should be more than enough money to deal with the vast PTSD problem among returning veterans. But the priorities the Veterans Administration has identified in spending the funds show a blind spot when it comes to PTSD.
One would hope that this massive increase in spending would include lots of money for PTSD treatment. But the Veterans Administration, though lauding the extra money, made no mention of PTSD or any other psychological counseling as it recounted the benefits of the extra funding.
So where is the money going? The VA says it will be used to expand VA health care eligibility to half a million “deserving” veterans over the next five years.581 It notes that the new budget “provides greater