Vietnam Veteran Survived Combat, Then Suicide Attempt After VA Didn't Help

Local Veteran no longer in ICU 
KRISTV.com
April 2, 2015

Raymond Harding suffers from PTSD, he is in the ICU after attempting suicide. (KRIS) 

CORPUS CHRISTI
The Vietnam Veteran who was hospitalized following a suicide attempt is no longer in the intensive care unit.

Hospital officials tell us Raymond Harding, a Vietnam veteran who suffers from PTSD, is listed in critical but stable condition.

Harding shot himself last Friday afternoon after.

His wife tells us, the VA failed to provide her husband the treatment he needed and had been requesting for a decade.
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Reporters seem to have forgotten Vietnam veterans are the majority of the suicides reported across the country along with every other veteran over the age of 50.

"Veterans over the age of 50 who had entered the VA healthcare system made up about 78 percent of the total number of veterans who committed suicide"

But why would we want to understand that simple fact? Why would we want to understand that Vietnam veterans pushed for all the research done on PTSD in the 70's? Why understand that all these decades later, with all the things done to "help" them after combat, it is now worse than ever?

Because then we'd actually have to acknowledge that what works has been forgotten. The only reason that would happen is, there just wasn't enough money in it for people looking to cash in.

Simple really.

Peer support works best but all across the country programs offering veterans groups have been cut. Sure charities claim to be doing it, but when the veteran offering support understands very little, it is more like the blind leading the blind. Training is almost non-existent but it sounds good to say it is offered.

This is what veterans not only need, it is what they seek out. They want to fit back in and they do exactly that within other groups of veterans. It doesn't cost a lot of money and isn't something that would get efforts a lot of attention.

So the VA hands out drugs, then more drugs when those drugs weren't working good enough. Pharmaceutical companies make money. Then you have the politicians pushing for all the fixes, getting their names on bills at the same time they slam the VA so that no one actually thinks about how all of this was allowed to get this bad after decades of "fixing it" by both political sides.

Then they really don't want any of us to understand that in order to privatize the VA, they have to destroy it first. That is really the only way veterans and citizens will ever accept the notion that private for-profit medical groups would be better to spend more money on instead of just fixing the VA once and for all veterans.

If you want to sleep better at night and support the famous charities out there not taking care of all veterans, remember what you just read and then ask yourself what it will be like when the newer veterans are their age and no one cares.