2 groups investigate the VA and find VA still failing horribly to help with mental health issues

There are no words to describe what goes through the minds of military veterans some days. Many have seen horrors that no person should, while others dealt with situations that caused them to become intimate with death. It would be nice if the agency created to help veterans would, but the Department of Veterans Affairs does nothing but fail. Could this be the reason so many of us are against the government controlling healthcare?

So, this video (and article) will cover the most recent findings on how badly the VA is failing, which is leading to veterans suffering with mental health issues even after asking for help. There comes a point that people need to quit pushing that we need to pay billions for other nations and criminal immigrants, as veterans and American children are being failed by these policies. American citizens need to speak up more.

NIH Report

To put all of this in perspective, we are going to use the words that were put into an NIH report, which surprised me they wrote this.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5563010/

The United States has become a country that is constantly at war. This situation has created a crisis amongst our veterans. The current uneven access to appropriate mental health services that returning U.S. veterans encounter echoes the disparities in access to quality mental health services for the general population. The information presented here shows that the shortcomings of our health care system in addressing the mental health needs for our returning veterans may lead to the high suicide rates. Addressing the problem of inadequate access to quality mental health services is critical in any efforts to reforming the U.S. health care system. Our findings suggest that mental health disparities are often a leading factor to the high suicide rates among veterans who experience depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. To improve the health and well—being of our veterans who have served this nation, requires a collaboration between public and non—profit mental health providers at the State and local levels. It is imperative that we increase the availability of crisis intervention and mental health services for all veterans that have served this nation.

Many recent reports have identified that individuals enlist for many reasons, often due to patriotism, educational benefits, a family tradition of military service and financial inducements. This may help explain why young adults enlist in the armed forces. Many youth often believes that they are invincible and one never thinks that they could get killed or seriously injured in a combat zone. Many recruits are high school graduates with limited job prospects and the military seems like a place to get a job and learn some skills. The reality is markedly different. Our soldiers today fight wars unlike any others who have fought. They fight a largely unseen enemy and face casualties from IEDs and suicide bombers. Many are injured and maimed by unseen foes. They fight for unclear objectives and end up coming home with limited skills and in many cases with severe physical and mental injuries. They are often separated from the military service with questionable employment prospects. A number of veterans experience depression, loss of purpose present, in some cases, an overwhelming family crisis. Their mental health difficulties profoundly touch the lives of the U.S. general public.

Recent reports documents that military personnel have experienced conditions that may have affected their mental well-being. Their efforts to gain access to quality psychological health services after multiple deployments are often met significant obstacles. This lack of access to critical mental health services may led to suicidal behavior, especially among young military veterans who have completed multiple deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Recent data on suicide rates among Army veterans, reported by the Department of Defense (DOD), showed an increase of more than 18% from 2011 to 2014. The Department of Veteran Affairs (DVA) is now struggling to find solutions to this national crisis for our veterans.

The rate of suicidal deaths is considerably high in the veteran populations. For example, the rate of suicides among women veterans is 35 per 100,000, a rate that is much higher than their civilian counterparts. Suicide in civilian populations is addressed, for example, by community-based mental health treatment providers such as Baltimore Crisis Response Inc. (BCRI), which serves the Greater Baltimore region, through a Crisis Response Hotline; mobile crisis response teams; and mental health and substance abuse treatment beds for inpatient treatment services. These and similar suicide prevention programs have proven to be successful in lowering suicide rates for the civilian population in urban communities such as Baltimore, and Boston.

ProPublica Findings

There are disturbing examples in the article, but we will cover just the facts they found in their investigation.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-veterans-affairs-fails-mental-health-patients

That conclusion emerges from a ProPublica review of all of the reports published by the VA’s inspector general since 2020. That includes 162 regular surveys of facilities and 151 investigations that were triggered by a complaint or call to the office on a wide variety of alleged health care problems.

Issues with mental health care surfaced in half of the routine inspections. Employees botched screenings meant to assess veterans’ risk of suicide or violence; sometimes they didn’t perform the screenings at all. They missed mandatory mental health training programs and failed to follow up with patients as required by VA protocol.

One in 4 of the reports stemming from calls or complaints detailed similar breakdowns. In the most extreme cases, facilities lost track of veterans or failed to prevent suicides under their own roofs.

Sixteen veterans who received the substandard care killed either themselves or other people, the review revealed. An additional five died for reasons related to the poor care, such as a bad drug interaction that the reports say could have been prevented. Twenty-one such deaths is a meaningful count even for a health care system that has more than 9 million people enrolled, in the view of Charles Figley, a Tulane University professor and expert in military mental health. The VA has struggled with mental health care for decades, he said. “It’s a national disgrace.”

For grieving family members, it is incomprehensible. “It was never my expectation that [the VA was] going to solve his problems,” said Colin Domek, the son of the veteran in Pittsburgh. “My expectations were that someone who was saying ‘help me’ would receive some kind of help.”

The inspector general reports reviewed by ProPublica have limitations. The individual investigations can be narrow. The reports offer only broad suggestions as to whether individuals should be held accountable for breakdowns and provide little sense of whether they actually were. Even together, they don’t capture the full reality of the VA’s 1,300 health care facilities. But they do start to assemble a meaningful picture of the system’s most chronic shortcomings when it comes to treating people with mental illness.

Experts told ProPublica the failures revealed in the inspector general reports point to broad problems, including inadequate mental health staffing, outdated policies and the inability to enforce high standards across a large, decentralized health care network.

“It’s a very sad thing,” said M. David Rudd, a psychology professor at the University of Memphis for whom the Rudd Institute for Veteran and Military Suicide Prevention is named. “You can sit here today and predict with great accuracy how many deaths there are going to be over the next five years. Yet there are unlikely to be any meaningful, significant changes.”

Military.com reports

Here is some of what Military.com found.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/17/canceled-appointments-unexplained-mixups-veterans-facing-challenges-getting-va-mental-health-care.html

The Department of Veterans Affairs actively encourages veterans to enroll in VA health care, and officials, including VA Secretary Denis McDonough, voice pride in the department's expertise treating combat-related mental health conditions. In 2023 alone, nearly 11% of the nation's 18.1 million veterans sought mental health services at the VA, having 19.6 million behavioral health "encounters" with the VA, including appointments, walk-ins and emergency room visits.

But veterans say they often can't get individual therapy appointments to accompany psychiatric medical care, and when they do connect, the treatment often is derailed by appointment cancellations and scheduling problems, according to more than a dozen veterans and current and former VA employees interviewed by Military.com.

They shared remarkably similar stories of working up the courage to seek help -- something that historically has not been easy in a community skeptical of mental health treatment -- and waiting months for sessions as multiple appointments were canceled, either at the start of a telehealth session or on arrival at a medical center or clinic.

Sometimes they'd be blamed, accused of failing to show up for appointments they didn't know about, or told they'd canceled the appointments themselves.

In the past 18 months, a former Army sergeant seeking mental health treatment at the VA Puget Sound Health System has had seven of 16 behavioral health appointments canceled, according to records provided by his mother to Military.com.

According to the records, the former soldier's appointments were canceled every month from July through November 2023.

"He keeps trying to go back in to school. He is having difficulty. He just wants to know what is wrong," his mom, Meredith, said. "He felt like he was not being taken seriously [and] is just frustrated by the delay."

Data provided by the VA showed that from 2020 through 2023, the cancellation rate for mental health appointments across facilities averaged 10.6%, with a high of 12.1% in 2020 early in the COVID-19 pandemic to 9.2% in 2023.

But individual medical centers may have bigger issues. Data obtained by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showed that at 14 representative facilities across the U.S., from January 2020 to late May 2021, the cancellation rate was nearly double the VA provided figures, at 21%, although the time frame coincided with the height of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on non-urgent care.

The foundation funds training, education and policy research for libertarian and conservative causes, including Concerned Veterans, an affiliated advocacy group that supports broader access for veterans to private health care.

Any cancellation can affect continuity of care and have a negative impact on a veteran's health, however. They may even contribute to suicide among veterans, although exactly how many is unknown. The number is not zero, however, according to families.

There comes a point where the VA needs to do their job, which is being hurt by government unions, but it still needs to be done.

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