VA Busted Again, as reported by a Marine

Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. Today, in addition to his role as a war correspondent in Afghanistan where he spent the winter of 2006/07, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website, affiliated only with Google News. Tim's coverage from Iraq that was set to begin in April has been delayed and may not take place until August, 2008. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

VA Busted Again Over Poor Diagnosis and Mistreatment of PTSD Vets
Tim King Salem-News.com
There are good people working for the VA, but its leadership keeps trying to cut wounded veterans off at the knees.

(SALEM, Ore.) - Maybe it was fate, perhaps it is what many refer to as "Murphy's Law"; either way the spirit of the Veteran's Administration reared its ugly head last week when an email in a few simple words, nearly sized up what many believe is their general policy in its treatment of combat veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

That policy in layman's terms begins with the agency's position to do anything possible to avoid paying veterans what they deserve, and results in them pumping veterans full of hard drugs to essentially make them vegetables. They can't complain after all, when they are no longer themselves. The VA creates this scenario in tens of thousands of Americans who deserve something better.

It all came to a head last week over a simple email. That electronic message contained a VA psychologist’s direction to staff at a Texas veterans facility to withhold diagnoses of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The author of the email, Norma J. Perez, is the PTSD program coordinator at the Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Texas. The email instructs staff to not provide the right medical diagnosis: "given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out."

This caretaker of America's injured combat veterans suggested to her staff that they "consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder."

Then as if to underscore the revelation, never intended for public eyes to see, the VA's Perez wrote that the staff at the VA "really don’t ... have the time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD."
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http://salem-news.com/articles/may192008/va_caught_again-5-19-08.php