Women Veterans Long Journey Home and Long Lines For Care

The VA woman problem
New York Times
Helen Thorpe
August 15, 2015

The 94th Annual Veterans Day Parade in New York City, 2013.

Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

On Sept. 11, 2001, Desma Brooks was a single mother of three in her mid-20s who served part-time in the Indiana Army National Guard. Watching the attack, she wondered if she might be assigned to a support role on the home front. Instead, she served two yearlong deployments – one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. During the second, while driving a military vehicle, she hit a roadside bomb. Brooks returned home with a mild case of traumatic brain injury and a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of the almost 22 million veterans in the United States today, more than 2 million are women, and of those, more than 635,000 are enrolled in the Department of Veterans Affairs system – double the number before 9/11.

Women are the fastest growing group of veterans treated by the VA, and projections show that women will make up more than 16 percent of the country’s veterans by midcentury.

Like Brooks, many female veterans are returning home with PTSD – the No. 1 complaint among women at VA health facilities. Hypertension and depression are the next largest diagnostic categories. And 1 in 5 female veterans treated reported experiencing military sexual trauma.

Disabled American Veterans, an advocacy and assistance group, recently issued a report called “Women Veterans: The Long Journey Home,” which includes a list of recommended changes. Among them are establishing a culture of respect for women, providing access to peer support networks, requiring every Veterans Affairs clinic to have a gynecologist on staff, removing barriers to mental health services, and adding gender-sensitive mental health programs aimed at women. “One of the most perplexing problems is a culture in V.A. that is not perceived by women as welcoming, and does not afford them or their needs equal consideration,” said Joy J. Ilem, the group’s deputy national legislative director, at this year’s Senate hearing. read more here