El Paso VA "We Make Our Own Diagnoses" on PTSD

Fort Bliss Shooting Highlights Broader VA Dysfunction
KRWG.com
By SIMON THOMPSON
January 21, 2015

"I want to tell you something we gave up our life for our country maybe we weren’t buried but a part of us got buried, we expect you to honor what we have done don’t treat us like we are here for a handout these are things that we were promised when we took the oath and we are warriors” Nick D'Amico

El Paso Veteran Nick D' Amico passed away in 2013

while waiting for medical care from the El Paso VA

Credit Simon Thompson

Every day 22 U.S. veterans commit suicide. The recent murder-suicide that took two lives at Fort Bliss is raising questions about the VA’s ability to manage ongoing mental health issues facing returning soldiers Simon Thompson reports.

Fort Bliss went on lockdown as authorities moved to contain an active shooter. The gunman was an Iraqi veteran and former El Paso VA employee Jerry Serrato. He shot and killed VA psychiatrist Doctor Timothy Fjordbak before turning the gun on himself and taking his own life. The FBI reported that Serrato had threatened Fjordbak in 2013 when both men were working at the El Paso clinic.

But there may have been another trigger. In a Washington post report- A former clinic employee said that Serrato was frustrated that the clinic had found his claim of post-traumatic stress disorder unwarranted and wasn’t going to give him the medical treatment he was expecting.

Lillian D’ Amico says it wouldn’t be the first time the El Paso VA has denied a veteran’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder she says the El Paso VA rejected treatment for her son Nick…who was diagnosed with PTSD years earlier at the VA in Phoenix, Arizona. In fact, she says they even rejected Nick’s PTSD diagnosis.

“The first time he brought his records with him and they said ‘We are not interested in theses , we make our own diagnoses’. So Nick had been in Albuquerque they looked at the records. they looked at the records, come here and they don’t want to look at the records They don’t want to treat the mental ill because they don’t have the doctors and they don’t have the money, there is too many of them” she says
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Fort Bliss Shooting Highlights Broader VA Dysfunction
January 21, 2015