My Turn: VA, community mental health partnership is vital Posted on April 24, 2015February 18, 2019 By PETER EVERS For the Monitor Friday, April 24, 2015 (Published in print: Friday, April 24, 2015) There is a wonderful charity called the Wounded Warrior Project that raises money for returning armed services men and women who are paying a price for serving our country. They have a phrase that sums up the sadness of a society that has difficulty in rising up to its responsibility of caring for those who have sacrificed in serving: “The greatest casualty is being forgotten.” Sometimes those individual casualties of war are not so visible and the mental health consequences of the conflicts that we send our young men and women toward incur a massive burden on our returning heroes. A couple of weeks ago, Congresswoman Ann McLane Kuster pulled together a roundtable of leaders in community mental health in New Hampshire and luminaries from the VA system who oversee behavioral health issues. She was interested in identifying the gaps in service delivery and assessing the needs of this population of individuals who remain under-served in relation to mental illness and the diseases of addiction. As in the world of health care in general, mental health issues are being identified as a key component of overall health. Unless we pay attention to the mind, the body cannot properly heal. How much more so is this the case with veterans returning from war zones around the world? How hard is it for them to find help from someone who understands what they are going through? They have been steeped in a culture of independence and individual strength, where reaching out for help is often seen as a sign of weakness. The VA has been working so hard on the issue of mental health but they can only do so much. New Hampshire has about 110,000 veterans, that is 8.4 percent of the population of the state and the majority of those are Vietnam-era vets. What became clear during this very timely roundtable was that local community mental health providers need to become more embedded into the fabric of the VA service system so it can complement the services that they provide. Easter Seals of New Hampshire is providing training at the moment for clinicians in the Granite State to improve their knowledge in the area of treating veterans for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and this skill set will broaden the base of competent providers who can work with our armed service members. What struck me as we sat and traded ideas during the roundtable was that we need our representatives locally and in Washington to take up this issue and make it a priority to provide the very best for our veterans and Congresswoman Kuster is right at the forefront of this effort. As providers of mental health care, we need to grow in confidence and competence so we can meet the mental health needs of our service men and women, and we need to work much more closely with the VA system so we can be seamless when it comes to matching the needs of those who have served and now look to us for help. (Peter Evers is CEO of Riverbend Community Mental Health in Concord.)
