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VA urged to give families mental health help

A House subcommittee was urged Thursday to expand the Veterans Affairs Department’s authority to provide mental health counseling for the families of veterans, including National Guard and reserve members who have returned from combat.

Current law restricts VA to providing “limited services to immediate family members,” said Kristin Day, VA’s chief consultant for care management and social work service.

“The law provides, in general, that the immediate family members of a veteran being treated for a service-connected disability may receive counseling, education and training services,” Day told the House Veterans’ Affairs health subcommittee.

That leaves a lot of gaps for people who fall outside the military health care system, some critics say.

Todd Bowers, government affairs director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said that when he was wounded by a sniper’s bullet during his second tour in Iraq, his mother suffered.

“The incident that physically wounded me wounded my mother much worse,” said Bowers, a Marine Corps Reserve staff sergeant. “As she struggled to cope with the knowledge of my injury, my mother was more than alone. She was lost. She sought assistance through the only means she was aware of, the mental health counseling covered by her own health care.”

Peter Leousis, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher and principal investigator for a congressionally funded project aimed at increasing community support for Guard and reserve members, said there is “mounting evidence” that service in Iraq and Afghanistan “comes at a price for families.”

Mental health problems for returning combat veterans, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, “has a secondary effect on spouses and partners,” Leousis said. He recommended that both returning veterans and their families should have “reasonable access” to mental health treatment — “reasonable” being care within a 30-minute drive.

Stacy Bannerman, author of a book about family stress caused by deployments and the wife of a Washington National Guard soldier who has deployed once to Iraq and may soon deploy again, said access to mental health counseling is especially difficult for the families of reservists.

“Guard families experience the same stressors as active-duty families, before, during and after deployment, although we do not have anywhere near the same level of support, nor do our loved ones when they come home,” Bannerman said.

“During deployment, we withdraw and do the best we can to survive,” she said. “Anxious, depressed and alone, we attempt to cope by drinking more, eating less and taking Xanax or Prozac to make it through.”

Bannerman said she thinks the government has studied combat stress and the effects on families enough, and that it is time for action.

“Perhaps rather than forking out another $5 million to $10 million for another study to define a problem that somehow never fully gets defined, much less treated, you could use that same amount of money to fund community-based centers providing our military families and veterans three years of free services that our families and vets are begging for.”

Joy Ilem of Disabled American Veterans said she thinks the government is being short-sighted by failing to provide mental health help for families.

“If left untreated, these conditions can destroy marriages and ultimately separate families and even result in homelessness and criminal convictions,” she said.

When families break up, veterans become more dependent on VA and other public agencies for help, which results in higher costs to the government, she said.

VA provides couples and marriage counseling at its Vet Centers but offers no special mental health services for family members, said Scott Sundsvold of the American Legion

A 2007 survey of all vet centers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico found that family therapy was available for veterans, but there was “no mental health support for the veterans’ immediate family members,” Sundsvold said.