The McClatchy newspapers continue their great series about whether and how the VA system is serving, or under-serving, returning combat veterans with PTSD.
In their recent story, "Suicide Shocks Montana into Assessing Veteran's Care," which by the way is an excellent fact-filled article, there is this troubling mention about what Chris Dana's dad found in his wastebasket, after Chris shot himself last March. Let's let the McClatchy papers tell the story:
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 trailer 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'd 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 last 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, left to languish by their military units and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
It's implied, but not stated, that Chris Dana might have been driven to suicide by the one-two punch of PTSD and then being discarded by his own unit as unfit to serve (and therefore to collect benefits). The timing is certainly...troubling. It's a heartbreaking story, and it wouldn't be surprising if it is, in many ways, being played out all across America, as returning veterans struggle with their own private demons -- grief and loss and trauma, from combat -- and find a system that not only doesn't embrace them, but makes it difficult for them to find the care they desperately need, when they need it. In Chris Dana's case, the system created more difficulties for him -- not helped him deal with the difficulties he already had.
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I've read a lot of stories by now about young veterans killing themselves, and my sympathies are really with them. Not instead of the veterans who, battling their own demons as well, end up harming others, sometimes but not always before harming themselves. One common thread to the stories where young vets take their lives is they often are aware that they have a problem, but the timing is bad about getting help. They, and their families, are often aware that something is wrong -- Johnny went off to war but didn't come back the same sweet, fun-loving guy who left -- but the drag is, they can't get in to get seen in enough time by competent mental health professionals. There's often an unconscionable wait to be seen at the VA. And of course they're often also pretty well-mired in the not-exactly-advantageous experience of self-medication with drugs or more commonly, alcohol -- to keep the demons at bay.
So they don't get seen in time enough, even though everyone knows something's desperately wrong, and the next thing you know, they're dead, and they're leaving families who are quite shell-shocked themselves by the double horror of having their child come home from war a substantially different person, and having them take their own lives, often in the family home. There's such a list by now, of callow young men, deep in a struggle with combat trauma, not getting the timely help they need, and dying by their own hands, leaving anguished families in their wake. Joshua Omvig, Jason Cooper, Jeff Lucey, Noah Pierce, Chris Dana, the list literally rolls on...120 a week.
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It's becoming apparent that PTSD is, in many ways -- except for the possibility of windfall payout -- a real lottery. It's a lottery whether you'll get it -- not everyone who goes to or through combat, does. It's a lottery when it will happen -- it often shows up a delayed interval after combat, not immediately (immediately would be more convenient for everyone). (In fact, it can show up many years -- as in, decades -- later. That's why you see Vietnam-era vets finally realizing they have it, as they reprocess their own trauma in sync with veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq.)
There are a few more lotteries, though. It's a lottery whether the VA will know how to treat you -- you'd be unhappily surprised if you saw the searches various VAs do on this very blog. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence that they know the direction to go in; seems quite a bit more like they're clutching at straws. It's also going to be a lottery whether you'll get evaluated in a competent way, and ascribed the correct percentage of disability. News reports lately, particularly from the McClatchy Newspaper chain, which did its own independent research, show that VAs vary widely from state to state in terms of how they confirm or compensate PTSD in their centers. (We blogged about it, here.) It's also a lottery whether the military will even see your case of PTSD for what it is; because it might create behavior problems that they start to see as failures in discipline, and demote or discharge you because of it (as they did in Chris Dana's case), and then you really won't be in a position to pay for your own care. And of course, it's really a lottery to see if your family, community, job, and social network will embrace you, accept you, or reject you. (It won't have much to do with your own worth; more to do with them, but no matter. It'll still hurt.) Then there's the lottery of whether you'll be able to afford to live on the meager proceeds of your disability pay, should you be "lucky enough" (there's the lottery concept again) to receive any. And the true, ultimate lottery of whether you'll end up becoming homeless -- a good one quarter of homeless males in America now, and the figure stands to go much higher, has been show to be veterans, many of whom have PTSD.
And of course there are also the lotteries of whether you'll become addicted to drugs and alcohol, in your quest to cope with the pain and self-medicate, either while you're waiting around for the VA to see you and/or take your case seriously, or, just because it's a socially-acceptable option that's within easy reach, and in some ways more instantly accessible than dealing with the ups and downs and unknowns of medications offered.
The only problem with all these lotteries? (and they are gambles, after all...) No positive payout.
I'm beginning to think, as I read story after story in the press of hapless veterans colliding with a system that doesn't care, and harming themselves or others, or just plain checking out, when they've reached the wall and can't find, or get, help for their suffering -- that the only "lottery" I know that resembles this is a very famous one indeed. "Survival of the fittest," a phrase that came to prominence with Charles Darwin, and the concept of natural selection. Only the very strongest can survive: the sick, the weak, the ailing, all fall behind and get taken out. Combat trauma -- a very natural reaction to very unnatural events -- weakens those it affects. And the system, such as it is, exemplified by the VA -- doesn't really stand ready to help in any pro-active, instantaneous, constructively helpful way. Not to mention, it's almost impossible for those traumatized to simultaneously also aggressively advocate for their own care. So the veterans who are struggling with trauma are weakened, and the system picks them off, one at a time -- by attrition, if not by outright neglect. I think that's why you see some Vietnam-era veterans jumping in to do what they can to help young vets just coming back. They literally don't want to see today's crop of veterans have to struggle as long or as hard as they've had to for the care that they need. I applaud the heart behind those vets' efforts, but at the same time I'm discouraged that, if PTSD is a lottery, we can't have a care system based on natural selection -- where only the strongest can survive its delays and haphazard care.
NOTE: Callow -- it's not an insult, it's a description. It means, lacking adult maturity or experience. Which sometimes allows you to put into perspective that whatever you're going through is not worth killing yourself over. Sometimes, but not always.
