Vietnam Veterans Shut Out of Support Group in Miami

This story has my blood pressure to the boiling point! The VA says they're moving to evidence based therapy. "Evidence based" in this case doesn't seem to include the fact this support is working for Vietnam veterans. WTF! Does it no longer matter that this is exactly what these veterans need to survive?

I've spent over 30 years with these veterans and the evidence came in a long time ago peer support from other veterans is vital to not just surviving but healing. They need the support to keep going but yet time after time Vietnam veterans are being shut out of the very thing that helps them the most.

When you read stories about veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq and their struggles with PTSD, it is easier to think this is all new but even as they received support and help faster than Vietnam veterans did, their problems are not different. Vietnam veterans we for decades without any help at all yet they are responsible for all the help that is available to the newer veterans.

What they lacked was the massive news coverage of what they were dealing with coming home. They didn't have reporters talking to them. They didn't have the internet, Facebook or the resources to discover what was happening all over the country. These veterans eventually found others to give and receive support the rest of the population would not even consider.

There are thousands of charities and support groups for the younger veterans because they are getting the attention and people want to help. So what about the older veterans still waiting for what they fought for? What about the older veterans shut out of the benefits they spent decades fighting for while the rest of the country ignored them?

They were forced into suffering in silence for decades. Taking away from these veterans is not just wrong, it is repulsive!

Vets decry counseling changes
Miami Herald
BY DALTON NARINE
SPECIAL TO THE MIAMI HERALD
11/08/2014

“Group solves problems of the day,” he says, “keeping the illness and suicidal thoughts at bay. Without it we don’t have that lifeline.”

Group therapy, a salve for the mentally wounded, is in trouble at the Miami VA. And Vietnam veterans like me are losing it.

True, as the saying goes, we don’t know what we've got until it’s gone. The VA has touted the psychotherapy unit to which I belong as the most successful at the downtown hospital. Yet, it’s being taken away.

The popular treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will no longer be available to those of us who served in Southeast Asia and still grapple with anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares, isolation, numbness, depression and, worse-case scenario, suicidal thoughts.

Forty years after the war, according to a Department of Veteran Affairs-funded study released in August, 11 percent of Vietnam veterans exposed to combat — more than 283,000 — continue to have symptoms of PTSD.

When the psychotherapy unit disbands within the next year, members will have the option to invest in a new program. We could find ourselves staring at our reflection through a different mirror of horror. The VA has paraded a 12-session alternative treatment, Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), that claims an easier route to coping with traumatic events so we could get back to living a consummate lifestyle. Back to our pre-warrior innocence?

With tension heavy enough on the brain, our group isn’t buying such intensive, in-your-face therapeutics. We believe in our capacity to sort out bedeviling issues through comradeship that had served us well in the war.

Yet, though I share a protective stance with my brothers, I’m the only one in the group to sign up for CPT, having tired of medication for this and that, even riveting ghostly nightmares and flashbacks that occasionally send up a wail through the fumes of the jungle in War Zone C.
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