Thoughts on Support Systems

I was at a meeting at the VA Medical Center in La Jolla Thursday afternoon. During the Director's remarks, Dr.  Smith noted that veteran suicides continued at about 20 a day and that about two-thirds of those had not accessed the VA Health System. That set me to thinking and it occurs to me that, more than 40 years into the modern All-Volunteer Force, veterans are more on their own than at any time in our history.

I suspect mental health support for the military has always been somewhat problematic. Even back in my day, there were clusters of us doing different things with different levels of stress attached to them. An Engineman assigned to a patrol boat on the Mekong had a completely different experience than an Engineman on a frigate out in the Gulf. I think exposure to combat changes people in ways that people who have never been exposed perhaps cannot comprehend.

Nothing in civilian experience prepares us for what we're going to do in the military. All of our training from enlistment through deployment is to temper us as in a crucible to think and react in specific ways to specific stimuli. Undoing all that has never been given a lot of attention.  My sense was that when there were hundreds of thousands of us in the community we could always depend on one another as we had done on the line. On the other hand, when we interviewed a WW II B-26 pilot for the Veterans History Project in 2014, he told us as we were leaving that that was the first time he'd spoken about his experiences because no one had wanted to hear about it when he got home.

I don't have a background in behavioral health. I do remember a period when I didn't feel as though I belonged here, but whether that was due to the seven years in foster care or 1968-69 or some mix of the two, I couldn't tell you. I don't think we're any more serious about providing mental health support to transitioning veterans than we are about providing rehabilitative medicine.