49,637 patients diagnosed with PTSD at Loma Linda VA last year alone

What good does it do to finally reach the Vietnam veterans so they get help for PTSD if the system is so overloaded no one has time to help them? That is the question I've asked myself everyday since I started this blog. The news coverage on PTSD is a blessing because after all these years veterans finally understand what they have been suffering from is not their fault, does not make them crazy and is not anything other than the outcome of combat trauma. The curse however is the fact no one was ready for the newer veterans coming back with PTSD at the same time we were finally reaching the Vietnam veterans. This is a flood of veterans needing to be treated and compensated but as the government tries to play catch up, they fail to see the tsunami offshore!

PTSD up 114% at Loma Linda VA
Jim Steinberg, Staff Writer
Posted: 03/14/2010 07:03:05 AM PDT


Richard Valdez hates the month of March - especially today, March 15.
That's the date 43 years ago when the former Marine machine-gunner was shot in the leg by a sniper in Vietnam's central coast region.

"I get moody and depressed. I get anxious. That wound changed my life," said Valdez, 63, a Highland resident.

Valdez suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which the National Institute of Mental Health defines "as an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened."

Decades after leaving Vietnam, Valdez sought help from the Jerry L. Pettis Memorial Veterans Medical Center in Loma Linda.

He is among the 49,637 patients diagnosed with PTSD who were treated at the hospital last year.

With an influx of veterans from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of patients diagnosed with PTSD at the Loma Linda medical center has soared 114 percent from 2005, Veterans Affairs officials say.



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