The report concluded less than half the veterans are seen within 14 days, and most have to wait an average of 50 days.
The Dayton VA Medical Center’s procedures for measuring the time it takes to see veterans follow agency guidelines, said Dr. Victor Knapp, a psychiatrist and chief of mental health services at the local VA. “We’re very concerned about access, and we put a lot of time into providing that,” Knapp said.
Even so, some members of Congress have criticized the findings. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a member of the Senate Veterans Committee, and U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said extended wait times were “unacceptable.”
“There’s still too many delays, there’s still too many backlogs, there’s still too many variations in service,” Brown said in an interview with the Dayton Daily News.
The Dayton VA estimates nearly 8,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have returned home to the Miami Valley, and 56 percent of those who sought services at the VA’s Freedom Center on the Dayton campus, said William Wall, program manager. The Dayton VA treated more than 2,300 veterans of all eras for post traumatic stress last year.
The numbers are climbing statewide. The VA diagnosed 22,602 PTSD cases in Ohio between 2009 through March 2012. About one-third — or 7,383 — were diagnosed the first three months of this year.
Last year, nationwide the VA treated 99,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan for PTSD.
The VA Office of the Inspector General’s report, which looked at medical centers in Denver, Milwaukee, Wisc.; Spokane, Wash., and Salisbury, N.C., found nearly half of veterans who needed a first-time mental health diagnoses were seen within 14 days. The majority, however, waited an average of 50 days.
The medical centers were chosen at random, an IG official told the Dayton Daily News.
The VA says it “concurs” with the inspector general report’s recommendations to take measures to shorten wait times. The agency expects to submit a plan by July 1 to better track how long veterans wait, set up an Office of Mental Health Operations, and has hired more mental health staff and increased the number of veterans counseling centers to meet demands.
Turner said veterans whose treatment is delayed can become discouraged from entering the VA system. U.S. Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, said he has raised the issue of wait times on veterans’ health and benefit claims and mental health treatment services with VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.
“We’re seeing a growing number of those cases which I am very concerned about,” Austria said.
David Kaplan, chief professional of the American Counseling Association in Washington, D.C., said the VA hasn’t filled 1,500 mental health staff positions while it says it will hire an additional 1,600 clinicians and 300 support staff.
“The system is broken,” Kaplan told the Dayton Daily News.
The ACA has pushed the VA nationally to hire licensed counselors to little avail, Kaplan said.
Vets say resources for program diminished
Some local veterans, meanwhile, say the VA has “stripped away” resources from a PTSD program.
Dayton VA officials say they’re added to the mental health staff and have put into practice a broader approach to PTSD treatment to allow more veterans to get treatment for multiple issues, such as depression and substance abuse.
“PTSD is one of only a number of issues we want to help with,” Knapp said.
The Dayton VA has 183 mental health staff and 16 job vacancies. The staff has added about 8 positions since October, the VA reported.
Six veterans participated in a roundtable at the Dayton Daily News to talk about their experiences with PTSD, their treatment and how they’ve adapted. They’re part of a support group for veterans at the Dayton VA who served in southwest Asia.
Thomas Bush Jr., 54, a retired Air Force combat veteran who lives in Riverside, said while the VA is gaining mental health staff, those employees haven’t been assigned to the PTSD program.
Among other concerns, the veterans said:
• The number of residential treatment beds for veterans is down to 79 beds, with six of those set aside for veterans with PTSD.
Knapp said the VA is in the midst of a $10 million renovation of mental health residential treatment facilities on its sprawling campus which will temporarily decrease the number of residential beds. Today, it has 97, but that will drop to 79 in August before returning next year to the 115 beds set aside in the mental health residential rehabilitation treatment program.
Those beds are available to veterans with PTSD and other medical issues, he said. The campus has another 120 medical beds and 265 set aside for nursing home care.
“We are not turning any veteran away,” Knapp said. “We are treating veterans.”
• Veterans also said their comrades with combat-related PTSD are combined into treatment classrooms, such as anger management classes, with other former service members who may have never seen combat but have other issues such as alcohol or drug abuse.
This can make PTSD-related combat veterans feel uncomfortable with sharing their feelings and experiences because they feel those who haven’t seen combat can’t relate, veterans said.
Knapp said the VA found veterans in separate treatment programs shared “a lot of commonality” in the issues they faced.
“We don’t have any evidence ... that the previous model versus the new model has changed the effectiveness of the treatment,” he said.
• Veterans said the Dayton VA has tried on different occasions to eliminate the support group. The agency relented after appeals to congressional offices and other protests, they said.
Knapp said he was unaware of any attempt to shutter the group, and would refer others to the “peer support” group.
Vets don’t always seek treatment
Still, sometimes its the veterans themselves who aren’t seeking the treatment they need.
Nearly 20 percent of U.S. service members who returned from Iraq or Afghanistan during a six-year period reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, the consultant RAND Corp. found in a study.
Yet only about half of those had sought treatment at the time of the 2008 study, the RAND researchers concluded.
Justin M. Weis, a Marine veteran of the Iraq war who has sought treatment for PTSD, said when he returned he and dozens of other Marines were asked as a group if they needed help when a VA representative showed up. The lack of confidentiality discouraged service members from seeking help our of fear of looking weak before their peers and higher ranking officers, said Weis, 31, of Huber Heights.
“It’s like the lepers,” he said. “Don’t touch that dude. Stay away from him.”
“I think it’s a long- standing culture,” Dr. Heid Kraft, of San Diego, Calif., and a former Navy psychologist who treated Marines in Iraq. “This has been a long haul of a culture that hasn’t had a lot of tolerance for anything but emotional perfection and there needed to be a shift in the way we think about combat trauma and it’s treatment.”
The military is starting to change its attitude, she said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2363 or bbarber @DaytonDailyNews.com..
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