VETS GETTING SCREWED AGAIN

Sadly, this is a recurring story.

VA system ill-equipped to treat mental anguish of war
By Chris Adams
McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Fri, Feb. 09, 2007

(EXCERPTS)

The Department of Veterans Affairs is facing a wave of returning veterans like Bowman who are struggling with memories of a war where it's hard to distinguish innocent civilians from enemy fighters and where the threat of suicide attacks and roadside bombs haunts the most routine mission. Since 2001, about 1.4 million Americans have served in Iraq, Afghanistan or other locations in the global war on terror.

The VA counts post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, as the most prevalent mental health malady - and one of the top illnesses overall - to emerge from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

- 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.

- 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.

Congress ordered the VA to maintain the "capacity" of its mental health care programs. Over the next several years, however, VA management and a committee of its mental health experts bickered over what "capacity" meant. The expert committee said that "capacity" meant the number of people served in special mental health programs and the amount of money spent, adjusted for inflation. The VA administration didn't adjust for inflation.

...the VA began treating many more people for mental health ailments, so the amount spent has plummeted from $3,560 per veteran in 1995 to $2,581 per veteran in 2004 - even before correcting for inflation. (Overall, mental health spending during that period went from $2.01 billion to $2.19 billion.)

Between 1995 and the first half of fiscal 2006, for example, general psychiatry visits for those in the mental health system dropped from an average of 11.7 a year to 8.1 a year per veteran, according to VA data.

In all, only 27 percent of veterans receiving PTSD care received it in one of the VA's specialized programs, VA data show. And that varies widely: In the region that includes Wisconsin, 13 percent of veterans with PTSD got care from specialized teams. In Ohio, 45 percent did.