Combating P.T.S.D. and Preventing Suicides

May 10, 2008
By Jennifer Litz
Editor

One of the most progressive treatment centers for Post Traumatic Stress Disorders in the country is coming to San Angelo, made possible by an $80,000 grant from the TRIAD Fund of Permian Basin Area Foundation. But what’s really special about the new center at 2607 Johnson Street is not its christening by foundation funds. The people conducting counseling services there are not your typical government bureaucratic types. They’re veterans of war, and even Ground Zero.

Gulf War vet Steve Olness is program manger for veteran’s services for Mental Health Mental Retardation Services of the Concho Valley. MHMR will share digs on Johnson Street with Emergency Services Respite Center to provide care for recently returned soldiers and other crisis responders suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“I was in the army in the first Gulf War, and when we came back, there was nothing like this,” says Olness. “Our war was nothing like this one, but there was nobody waiting to try to get you used to civilian life again. Or get you used to peacetime. There wasn’t anything. We just came back, and a lot of guys who got out of the military right after that, you got a handshake and goodbye.”

Olness says the soldiers coming back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to need lot of help—and so are the military resources set up to receive them.

“It’s going to be like a tidal wave,” Olness says. “Because some of these kids are pulling three, four, and five tours over there. And when you pull an 18-year-old kid fresh out of high school, send him to training and he goes to a combat area, and all he knows is what he was taught to do, sometimes that means he has to take another person’s life. And then he comes back home, and everyone lauds him as a hero—but he doesn’t feel like a hero.”

Olness says there’s a stigma to having PTSD. “If a [solider comes back with] diagnosed PTSD, the military has to pay ‘x’ number of dollars for the rest of his life,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be easier for them to say, ‘You’re not doing your job; you’re late for formation; I hear you’ve had problems with your wife . . .’ it’s easier to put him out of the military and give him limited benefits if any at all.”

Olness says the new program will offer counseling to vets without the stigma.

“If you’re on active duty, you get labeled right away,” he says. “You don’t want to be the NCO that is in charge of troops that’s the guy that can’t handle it. He’s done his time in combat, and now he’s training other troops, and you don’t want to be trained by a guy who can’t take it.”

The program created with TRIAD funds features counselors and doctors on staff who can see patients and even prescribe medicine. Many staffers are veterans themselves.

The Problem with the VA

Pat Dugan was a reconnaissance marine corporal in Vietnam for 19 months, starting in 1966. He’s now a passionate voice for veteran help that resounds throughout West Texas. Dugan says the problem with the Department of Veteran’s Affairs is that they haven’t delivered on the promise Dugan received that the military would take care of him for his service. Instead, Dugan, like Olness, paints the picture of a disrespectful, mainly incompetent VA system. He foresees bad times ahead for the “kids” currently turning several tours, who will come home to bureaucratic red tape rather than help from government agencies.

“I am seeing one of the biggest mushroom clouds,” Dugan says of times ahead for Iraq/Afghanistan veterans. “’Cause I’m thinking, the public runs around with yellow ribbons on their cars, but what I don’t see, except with Congressman Ciro Rodriguez (TX-23), is people realizing that everyone in this war has PTSD. Because there are no front lines in this war. You can be [in a non-combat service] and get your butt blown off the road there with anyone else. Everyone’s sitting around waiting for an explosion to go off, and they send you back and back for more tours.”

When these vets do come back home—or in between myriad deployments—they’re still fighting—for their benefits. “In Del Rio, for example, we’ve got people with problems,” Dugan says. “And they have to travel 150 miles to get help [at a VA clinic]. And then when you get up there, I’m not being mean, but when you go up there and apply to get help, you get some VA muffin that’s not a veteran, and they put you through mental gymnastics like you wouldn’t believe. [Vets] don’t want to be humiliated and go through that process.”

Dugan praises programs like the new MHMR/ESRC building. He can even name one state agency that does things right—The Texas Veteran’s Commission, whom he sees as a shining example for others like it.

“I think the Texas Veteran’s Commission is as fine as any in the US,” he says. “They treated me with dignity and respect, talked with me, and took their time with me. They are an example.”

Conversely, Dugan describes nightmarish situations at Audie Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital and others. During one visit, Dugan was chastised loudly for allowing an 80-year-old woman on oxygen to cut ahead of him for treatment. Another time, Dugan was rebuked for offering his Marine Corps serial number as identification. “We don’t use those anymore, we use social security numbers,” an administrator scoffed. But Dugan says the Corps had taught him to be proud of his serial number. Everyone has a social security number; Dugan felt he earned that serial number.

“I was so pissed off, I came home and gave my Jack Russell Terrier my serial number, so now he’s 2164539USMC,” Dugan says. “That was my rebuke to the VA.”

But not only do many vets express their feeling that VA administrators, many of who have never served, lack respect for veterans, they also lack some basic “industry” knowledge.

“One of my friends had a Navy Cross—it’s the second highest medal awarded, for an extreme act of heroism,” Dugan says. “He walked into the VA, and the lady asked him [about a combat action ribbon]. She said they didn’t issue those until ’71, and he had gotten out of the service in ‘69. So she says, ‘Do you have any proof that you saw combat?’ And he said, ‘I got a Navy Cross, does that count?’ And she said, [thinking is was akin to a Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy] ‘Did I ask you about your insurance? I asked you about your Combat Action Ribbon!’ She didn’t even know what a Navy Cross was. She thought it was insurance.”

The ESRC

Olness and co. are getting help from more sympathetic people who have been in the ground, be it Iraq or Ground Zero. Rosendo “Rosey” Velez co-founded the Emergency Services Respite Center after Sept. 11. Velez, then a medical first responder in New York, had helped clean up the aftermath of Sept. 11, and lost 87 friends and 120 more coworkers in the process. So he has a little experience with PTSD. His is a story that, for our intents and purposes, started at Ground Zero, and continued with his relocating to San Angelo, where he was finally able to breathe easier and share his healing with West Texas.

“We’ve been doing this since before Sept. 11,” says Velez, who has been trained to watch out for PTSD in coworkers as a first responder. “I was a paramedic at Ground Zero. ESCR started as outreach for those cops, firefighters, etc. But as the work engulfed different agencies, we’ve changed our mission statement to where we’ve taken in DOD personnel, hospital personnel, anyone with traumatic experiences.”

Velez says their treatment is different than that of MHMR, though the ESRC is in the Johnson building. ESRC does temporary peer and group counseling and consults. “Then we try to find a more permanent way of treating them,” Velez says. “Through ESRC, soldiers come talk to us, they look for help, and I try to find them a doctor—but because they’re seeing [a doctor] through ESRC, they can’t see them forever. So we try to find a more permanent way of dealing with their problems that their insurance may or may not cover.” Velez says teaming up with MHMR has provided the ESRC with readily available doctor resources that can prescribe medicine when and if needed.

But the ESRC also provides MHMR with favorable “loopholes” as well. For one, they host casual family day events for soldiers or police officers only, where those service members can discuss their problems with military chaplains. “All you gotta do is show a military ID or job ID, and everything at the event—food, kids’ bouncy ball stuff, etc.—[is] free to people there,” he says. “But we’d have guys in bright neon shirts walking around, that said ‘chaplain.’ And you’d be surprised how many people have taken their families to these events, and while the kids are in the bouncy ball area, they’ll want to talk with the chaplain. Maybe it’s a husband and wife having trouble after [one has] come back from overseas...”

The ESRC is also not bound by grant rules the way MHMR’s program may be in certain cases. For example, if the MHMR grant is written in such a way that they can’t hold a group argument session, the ESRC can provide that outlet.

Rosey’s Story

“We were created October 1, 2001, and the president didn’t send anyone out till April, 2002; so the day after the president sent troops to Afghanistan, that’s when we amended our mission statement to take care of DOD personnel,” says Velez. Prior to April, they had been doing outreach for fire, EMS, and law enforcement that had dealt with Sept. 11 and Ground Zero. Years later, they now have several offices, including New York, Virginia, and, of course, San Angelo.

Velez, like Olness, says the military isn’t great about recognizing PTSD. Velez says his experience is that civilian crisis responders like firefighters or EMS are better informed about what can happen to them after a particularly gruesome job.

“I’ve been on the job over 17 years, and PTSD was on the forefront,” Velez says. “In the academy, that’s the first thing they drilled in your head: look at your partner and yourself. If you see things happening, speak up. It’s easier for firefighters or [the like] to put themselves in a position where they can hurt themselves.

“After September 11, I grabbed the assistant commissioner of The Department of Mental Health and Hygiene and said, ‘look at their faces—we’re going to have a bunch of guys killing themselves.’

The “guys” Velez refers to are those like him, who helped exhume bodies and clean up other hellish rubble.

“In 2001 I was a captain of Special Operations Divisions of the New York Critical Response Medical Services,” he says. “And because I lost my old partner and good friend Carlos Lillo, and I was in front of building 7 when it collapsed, PTSD hit me really hard. But I didn’t realize it then. And my way of dealing with it was not going home. I worked at the site for months before I went home to take a shower. I got injured on the site, I stayed on the site, and I volunteered for everything.”

The turning point came in the form of little boxes from San Angelo children: There were about 4.5 tons of relief supplies that came from San Angelo and West Texas children. Velez was the first to see them.

“There was a point where firefighters and cops were beating each other down on Broadway because of tension over who would take charge on finding the bodies,” he says. “We were beating each other down, and the boxes showed up. I called a couple guys to meet me at the distribution site. I had the hardest core guys you could imagine. One of them was a hardcore Irishman, 30 years on the job; one minute he could deal with a hostage situation, put a bullet in the bad guy’s head, then turn around and go to nursery school. He is like the combination of G.I. Joe and Santa. And when I saw him [and others], and they opened up the boxes and I saw them crying. A lot of people don’t understand that this shipment was the first thing ever to reach us from outside our home base.

“It was really significantly different. If you look at Ground Zero, there’s a part in October going into November, you see next to the American flag a Port Authority flag, and then you saw the Texas flag there. No-one knows the story about that, except for us. That’s also when you started seeing the little Texas flags on guys’ helmets, because kids had sent us that.

“I was staring at the mess hall in one of the Port Authority command posts, I’m looking at these guys, now they’re trading these pictures like baseball cards—‘read this one! No this one, this one’ll get to you!’ And I saw these guys trying to open the pea cans, or cops using their radios to smash nuts. It was a total 180 from what was not even 24 hours before.”

That led to Velez’s boss sending him and several others to San Angelo, Lubbock, and other cities that had sent the supplies.

“I didn’t want to leave,” Velez says of his visit to San Angelo. “I realized I wasn’t breathing as hard here. So for a couple years I set up things with guys here, and members of agencies came up to New York to represent the state of Texas. There was a lot of communication going on. And the more I came out here, the more I saw my health was getting better. Long story short, I brought my wife out here, and we moved.”

Velez says he was planning on retiring, but admits the obvious—that hasn’t happened. In fact, he travels all over Texas to help people who need counseling. “I had a guy in Sweetwater call me up, an Army National Guard guy,” he says. “I didn’t realize how far it is.” But that didn’t stop Velez, whose 9/11 injuries include only 49 percent lung capacity and a crushed leg.

“What makes it hard for me in Texas—DOD personnel is easy for me to deal with, but what makes it hard for firefighters and cops here is that Texas has an at-will labor law,” he says. This is different than unionized civil servant outfits, which offer more job security. “A lot of police officers, members of the sheriffs department here could be thrown out because of a new election. It’s hard for them to deal with stuff when they could be canned for no reason. It’s hard to seek help if they have no recourse.”

Legislation

Congressman Ciro Rodriguez (TX-23) has introduced a few bills dealing with PTSD. Many are still pending: House Resolution 2689 sought to secure local provider help for PTSD victims and their families. It was rolled into a more comprehensive resolution, the Healthcare Improvement Act of 2007 (HR2874). The bill is still awaiting Senate action.

Rodriguez is working on another bill to help get vets the help they need when they come home. In order for veterans to get PTSD disability benefits, it has to be linked directly to combat, via a combat medal or the like. However, active duty servicemen like Air Force can sometimes develop PTSD when they go on special convoys, or if mortar comes into a base. Congressman Rodriguez looked at the language of The Veterans Disability Benefits Claims Modernization Act of 2008 at the end of April to broaden the scope of PTSD benefits. Congressman Rodriguez thinks veterans should get disability benefits if they have PTSD and served in a combat zone, even if they don’t have a combat medal or citation.

Rodriguez’s interest in PTSD stems from a childhood experience. He was a school patrol as a child when a car didn’t stop for his sign and ran over a young girl. “That has always stayed in my mind, kind of frozen there,” Rodriguez says. “I could see a little girl’s body under the back tire, which went over her.”

Rodriguez acknowledges that part of the problem with PTSD is that we don’t know a lot about it. He’s supported bills that have gone toward millions of dollars of research on the disease.

“The military just identified 23,000 or so with personality disorders,” Rodriguez says. “I believe we might have a lot of people out there with personality disorders that might be diagnosed as PTSD and vice-versa. But if you’ve got a personality disorder, it’s a pre-existing condition, so you don’t get benefits. Seems like the program is geared toward labeling them—when in doubt, just label them [as PTSD] so they don’t get anything.”

Luckily, the building at 2607 Johnson is scrambling to fill in the holes these PTSD victims may slip through: Rodriguez quotes a recent AP story reporting that there have been more suicides from vets than American casualties in our current wars.

That’s why Steve Olness says the new building and the program will be up-and-running soon, but they’re already helping people now.

“I’d do it now. If a vet was to call me right now, we would start now if I had to sit on a cardboard box.”