VA expands nurses to combat homelessness in Greater Los Angeles

Nurse.com

A February report from The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness showed California has almost 12,000, or 44%, of the nation’s homeless veterans, with more than half of those men and women living on the streets of Greater Los Angeles. However, in pushing to meet the Obama Administration’s goal of ending homelessness among veterans by 2015, the Veterans Administration of Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System saw an estimated 21% decline in its homeless veteran population between 2011 and 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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Lawmakers wonder if VA underestimates impact of health care reform

Marine Corps Times

A House committee is concerned that the Veterans Affairs Department may be underestimating the cost and burden of national health care reform for veterans’ hospitals and clinics. Beginning next year, the Affordable Care Act penalizes people who do not have health insurance — part of a move intended to control overall health insurance costs by expanding the number of people with insurance. VA could end up with some of those people because its health plan meets the new law’s definition of “minimum essential coverage.”

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Veterans Corner: Study finds doctors ignoring VA guidance

Lake Country Sun

Department of Veterans Affairs doctors are continuing to prescribe tranquilizers such as Valium and Xanex to veterans diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, despite VA guidelines advising against their use for the condition. That finding is according to Dr. Nancy Benardy, clinical psychologist with the VA's National Center for PTSD. Her research can be found under Veterans Education and Research Association of North New England. Almost a third of veterans being treated for PTSD are prescribed benzodiazepines, a class of sedatives commonly used to treat insomnia, anxiety, seizures and other conditions.

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Congressional committee looking into VA medical center deaths in Decatur

WSBTV.com

The chairman of a powerful congressional committee says he wants officials at the Atlanta VA Medical Center in Decatur disciplined, potentially suspended or fired, because of the scandal first reported by Channel 2 Action News. Channel 2's Scott MacFarlane spoke to Rep. Jeff Miller, the chairman of the U.S. House Veterans Affairs Committee, which oversees the VA. Miller says he's also considering formal hearings to investigates what's been happening in Decatur.

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At Army base, an aggressive campaign against suicide

Los Angeles Times

Army Pvt. John Jeffery stumbled into Kyle Boswell's barracks room at Ft. Bliss before dawn one day in February, his eyes glassy. "I've done something," Jeffery mumbled to his buddy. "I can't tell anyone. It's going to happen." He had just learned his girlfriend was cheating on him. The Army had decided to kick him out for using heroin. Now the 21-year-old veteran of Afghanistan had downed more than two bottles of Vicodin and Oxycodone, powerful prescription painkillers. Boswell rushed him to the emergency room, and he remains in the hospital psychiatric ward.

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Sedatives Used for PTSD Treatment Despite Warnings

Military.com

Department of Veterans Affairs doctors are continuing to prescribe tranquilizers such as Valium and Xanax to veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder -- despite VA guidelines advising against their use for the condition. Almost a third of veterans being treated for PTSD are prescribed benzodiazepines, a class of sedatives commonly used to treat insomnia, anxiety, seizures and other conditions, according Dr. Nancy Bernardy, a clinical psychologist with the VA’s National Center for PTSD.

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Army veteran, a UCLA student, teaches class on combat and military life

UCLA Newsroom

UCLA senior Andrew Nicholls served eight years in the U.S. Army, including a year in Iraq. Now, he's sharing his firsthand perspectives about the military and combat in a UCLA psychology course he's teaching this quarter called "Fast Cars and Battle Scars: Understanding the Modern Combat Veteran and PTSD." "We'll discuss the entire process, from who chooses to serve in the military, what it's like to be trained to kill somebody and how that affects you, to things that happen in combat, as well as military culture and civilian life when you leave the military," said Nicholls, a 29-year-old psychology major who will graduate in June. "I thought undergraduates who never served in the military should have some idea what it's like … so that as future voters and perhaps policymakers, they can think about veterans' issues in a more nuanced way."

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US must step up response to vets, report says

WBAY

Timely and adequate health care is needed to help U.S. military personnel and their families readjust to life after deployment, an Institute of Medicine report finds. The departments of defense and veterans affairs also must step up efforts to reduce the stigma associated with receiving care for mental health and substance abuse problems, the report said. They also should ensure their methods of diagnosis and treatment are in line with the latest medical evidence, according to the report, which was requested by Congress.

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Dwarfed by the Magnitude of the Problems

Time

That’s the grim bottom line of a major new study in the state of post-9/11 veterans released Tuesday morning by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the prestigious and independent National Academy of Sciences. “Although the majority of returning troops have readjusted well to post-deployment life, 44 percent have reported difficulties after they returned,” a summary of the report says. “Significant numbers of personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and many have shown symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and substance misuse or abuse.”

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Families share the pain of veterans' PTSD (with video)

Plain Dealer

Lyndsay Glenn and Jean Lauro are the home front's walking wounded of war. They, and others who care for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), may not have been in combat, but they can wage much the same battles, suffering similar psychic wounds, as those who have. Their common "enemies" are anger, frustration, isolation, anxiety and a variety of other psychiatric problems.

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Young veteran's suicide shatters air of stability

NorthJersey.com

Bergen County Freeholder David Ganz had a habit over the last two years of giving his colleagues brief updates at their public meetings on his son Scott, a soldier serving with the Army Reserve. His updates were at times a welcome respite from some otherwise tense political arguments. After one particularly long and heated debate in August, Ganz announced: “My son Scott is home. He’s back from Afghanistan.” The room broke into spontaneous cheers and applause. But in late February, the same room turned somber as Ganz disclosed that his son had committed suicide in his apartment in Orlando, Fla. Scott Ganz was 30 years old.

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On the 10th Anniversary of the War in Iraq, a View on the Health of U.S. Soldiers

Healthline

As a decade of combat in Iraq draws to a close and thousands of troops return home from the battlefields of Afghanistan, we must consider the toll that more than a decade of combat has taken on the minds and bodies of the soldiers serving the U.S. A 2009 report by the military-funded RAND Corporation reveals that 14 percent—or 340,000—of post-9/11 combat veterans exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Moreover, 267,000 cases of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, have been diagnosed in young veterans since 2000, according to the Department of Defense, though the majority of these injuries occurred in non-deployment settings.

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A Pattern of Problems at a Hospital for Veterans

New York Times

In an unusually strong letter sent to the White House on Monday, the office that handles complaints from federal whistle-blowers says it has found a pattern of problems at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Jackson, Miss., that raises serious questions about the hospital’s management practices. The problems over the last six years include poor sterilization procedures, chronic understaffing of the primary care unit and missed diagnoses by the radiology department.

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Drug Diversion and Abuse: VA Agrees to PMP Database Dump

Pharmacy Times

The prescription monitoring programs (PMPs) throughout the country are probably the single most innovative help in years to law enforcement trying to deal with pharmaceutical diversion issues. Although some of the states’ systems are not as friendly to law enforcement access, those that are provide a wealth of easily accessible information for potential prosecutions.

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Heroic Iraq vet, Capt. Peter Linnerooth, who spent years counseling soldiers during the bloodiest stretches of the Iraq war loses struggle with PTSD, commits suicide

Associated Press

During his time as an Army psychologist, Linnerooth met with soldiers 60 to 70 hours a week to help them cope with the carnage of the battlefield. When he returned home to Minnesota in 2007, he battled PTSD, depression and anger, and ultimately turned a gun on himself earlier this year.

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VA Gives Tranquilizers to 30 Percent of PTSD Patients, Despite Warnings

Nextgov

The Veterans Affairs Department treats more than 30 percent of veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder with tranquilizers such as Xanax and Valium, despite clinical practice guidelines issued in 2010 warning against their use, VA’s National Center for PTSD reported. The 2010 PTSD clinical practice guidelines, which also apply to the Defense Department, cautioned providers against using benzodiazepines to manage PTSD due to “the lack of efficacy data and growing evidence for the potential risk of harm,” the PTSD center said in the March edition of its research quarterly publication.

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Report details flaws in Army's handling of PTSD

Duluth News Tribune

An Army report released Friday finds the service still has trouble diagnosing and treating soldiers for post-traumatic stress disorder, despite more than doubling its number of military and civilian behavioral health workers over the past five years. Confusing paperwork, inconsistent training and guidelines, and incompatible data systems have hindered the service as it tries to deal with behavioral health issues, the report said. It's a crucial issue: After a decade of war, soldier suicides outpace combat deaths.

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Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home

New York Times

In the caverns of her memory, Tiffany Jackson recalls the job she held, fleetingly, after leaving the military, when she still wore stylish flats and blouses with butterfly collars and worked in a high-rise with a million-dollar view. Two years later, she had descended into anger and alcohol and left her job. She started hanging out with people who were using cocaine and became an addict herself, huddling against the wind on Skid Row here.

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'Something is clearly missing' in VA mental health care

U.S. News

Eighty percent of veterans who attempted suicide and survived had received mental health care one month earlier from the Department of Veterans Affairs, underscoring the potential peril of 50-day average wait times they face in trying to access VA treatment, a suicide expert told a Congressional committee Wednesday. “When they had contact a month prior, the question I ask is: How long was it until their next (VA) appointment? Was it scheduled six weeks out? Is that the problem? Or was it scheduled one week out?” David Rudd, head of the National Center for Veteran Studies, testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

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The Deadly Rise of Prescription Drug Abuse in the Military

MyABC50.com

Over the past decade, the military has spent $1.6 billion on painkillers (opioids) such as Oxycontin and Hydrocodone. $2.7 billion has been spent on anti-depressants and more than $507 million on sleep medications such as Ambien. According to the National Academy of Sciences, prescription medication has been abused along with alcohol in the last few years. Prescription drug abuse, mostly the use of painkillers tripled since 2002. The military substance abuse program has seen an overall increase in the amount of individuals enrolled in their program.

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