By T. Christian Miller
June 17, 2007

Samuel Walker saw combat in Iraq firsthand: He was splattered with human flesh and shrapnel in a dining hall when a suicide bomber blew himself up just a few feet away.

When Walker got back to the U.S., he brought some of the battlefield home with him. He heard phantom screams in broad daylight, smelled gunpowder that wasn’t there. A loud noise would send him into a defensive crouch. He’d been eating French fries in the mess hall at the time of the blast, and the sight of a McDonald’s restaurant now brought back violent memories.

Two doctors diagnosed Walker with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, directly related to his close encounters with violence in Iraq.

But Walker was not a combat soldier. He was a civilian recreation supervisor for KBR, the largest contractor in Iraq. And instead of getting the medical and counseling help he sought, Walker, a U.S. Army veteran, found himself caught in a morass of red tape and rejected insurance claims.

A Times investigation of a taxpayer-financed insurance system, based on reviews of scores of cases, has found a pattern of repeatedly blocked claims for treatment of psychological injuries sustained by civilian workers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some seriously afflicted contract workers have been dumped into indigent medical care programs, according to court records. Many have had to wage lengthy legal battles to win payments for psychological treatment. At least four have committed suicide after returning home from Iraq, according to court records and interviews with attorneys and family members.

Although insurance companies have paid for counseling for many workers, they also have fought claims for psychological treatment more than for other types of injuries, according to data compiled by The Times from Department of Labor records.

Though contractors claiming psychological problems made up about 4% of nearly 1,400 serious reported injuries from 2003 to 2005, such workers accounted for 13% of the cases fought out in courtrooms.

In fighting claims, the insurance companies have relied on doctors with questionable expertise, according to court records and claimants’ attorneys.

Read the rest of story here.

Dorothy Clay Sims, Esq. ~ Sims, Stakenborg & Henry, PA.

Offices in Ocala, Marion County, Florida and Gainesville, Alachua County, Florida. We provide service to the surrounding areas. Our telephone number is: 352-629-0480. Please visit our website at: www.ocalaw.com  

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By Anna Boyd

An employee with the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas sent an e-mail message to staff members suggesting them to stop diagnosing PTSD in order to save time and money treating veterans. The message was dated March 20 and titled “Suggestion,” and it was addressed to several staffers including psychologists, social workers and a psychiatrist. “Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that we refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder, R/O PTSD,” Norma Perez, a PTSD program coordinator and psychologist at the Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple Texas. (R/O stands for “rule out.”) “Additionally, we don’t…have time to do extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,” the e-mail added. The e-mail was obtained and released publicly on Thursday by VoteVets.org, a veterans group that had criticized the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit government watchdog group.

In response to Perez’s e-mail, Veterans Affairs Secretary James B. Peake released a statement saying the e-mail was “inappropriate” and does not concord with the VA policy.

Read full article here.

Dorothy Clay Sims, Esq. ~ Sims, Stakenborg & Henry, PA.

Offices in Ocala, Marion County, Florida and Gainesville, Alachua County, Florida. We provide service to the surrounding areas. Our telephone number is: 352-629-0480. Please visit our website at: www.ocalaw.com

…but Pentagon Pretends Nothing’s Going On
    By Penny Coleman
    AlterNet

    Tuesday 29 April 2008

An activist travels to the DoD’s annual suicide prevention conference, only to find the military brass living in a parallel universe.

    The silverbacks are grooming and posturing at the microphones.

    Camo and khaki, wall to wall. Bob Ireland, an Air Force psychiatrist and consultant to the Air Force Surgeon General, welcomes the audience to the Department of Defense’s sixth annual Suicide Prevention Conference and makes jokes about how suicide prevention has been the DoD’s bastard child, homeless and parentless.

    In January 2008, the child nobody wanted finally managed to find a home. The Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury assumed responsibility for an issue and an injury that the military has hidden and denied for generations.

    It’s been left up to Lt. Col. Steven Pflanz, the senior psychiatry policy analyst for the Air Force surgeon general, to report on the mental healthcare practices that have been developed for those on active duty. Kerry Knox, director of the VA’s Center for Excellence on Suicide Prevention, was scheduled to share with him these introductory remarks, but is not in attendance. Apologies are made, but no one mentions how obviously difficult it would be for her to get into the self-congratulatory HOOAH! spirit of this conference when her boss just got busted big time for hiding VA suicide statistics, not just to the media but to Congress as well.

    ”Shh!” Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director, coyly began an email to the agency’s chief communications director - and inconveniently made public just this week. “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

    Ach, Katz, you little schemer.

    In another email, he acknowledged that an average of 18 war veterans manage to kill themselves each day - five of whom were under VA care at the time.

    OK, Katz is toast. Democrats are already calling for him to resign, which seems rather mild considering how many lives were damaged by his attempts at damage control. But do the math: That’s 12,000 veterans a year - VA patients - trying to kill themselves. On top of that, of the 6,570 who on average succeed each year, 1,825 of them are also patients at the VA. How is possible not to mention that kind of news at a conference on military suicides?

    This must have been a challenging week for the conference organizers. How to deal with the Katz e-mails and the new RAND Corporation report, which is devastating in its description of DoD and VA failures. And the RAND report can’t be blown off as the ravings of a bunch of leftists with an anti war agenda; RAND conducts research and analysis for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Commands, the defense agencies, the Department of the Navy, and the U.S. intelligence community.

    The report revealed that nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - that’s 300,000 men and women - have symptoms of post-traumatic stress or major depression. Of those, only slightly more than half have sought VA treatment. Soldiers say that hesitation to seek help arises from fear that it will harm their careers.

    But word gets around. Even among those who do seek help, RAND estimates that only about half receive treatment their researchers consider “minimally adequate.” So why bother.

    The study also estimates that about 320,000 service members may have experienced a traumatic brain injury during deployment, but that just 43 percent reported ever being evaluated by a physician for that injury, despite DoD’s policy that every soldier returning from Iraq be screened.

 Click here to read the rest of the article.

Dorothy Clay Sims, Esq. ~ Sims, Stakenborg & Henry, PA.

Offices in Ocala, Marion County, Florida and Gainesville, Alachua County, Florida. We provide service to the surrounding areas. Our telephone number is: 352-629-0480. Please visit our website at: www.ocalaw.com

By PAUL ELIAS, Associated Press Writer Sun Apr 20, 11:13 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO - The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs isn’t doing enough to prevent suicide and provide adequate medical care for Americans who have served in the armed forces, a class-action lawsuit that goes to trial this week charges.

The lawsuit, filed in July by two nonprofit groups representing military veterans, accuses the agency of inadequately addressing a “rising tide” of mental health problems, especially post-traumatic stress disorder.

But government lawyers say the VA has been devoting more resources to mental health and making suicide prevention a top priority. They also argue that the courts don’t have the authority to tell the department how it should operate.

The trial is set to begin Monday in a San Francisco federal court.

An average of 18 military veterans kill themselves each day, and five of them are under VA care when they commit suicide, according to a December e-mail between top VA officials that was filed as part of the federal lawsuit.

“That failure to provide care is manifesting itself in an epidemic of suicides,” the veterans groups wrote in court papers filed Thursday.

 Read full article here.

Dorothy Clay Sims, Esq. ~ Sims, Stakenborg & Henry, PA.

Offices in Ocala, Marion County, Florida and Gainesville, Alachua County, Florida. We provide service to the surrounding areas. Our telephone number is: 352-629-0480. Please visit our website at: www.ocalaw.com

What the HELL are all the veterans and their advocates complaining …
By TKKMilo
CBS News’ investigative unit wanted the numbers, so it submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense asking for the numbers of suicides among all service members for the past 12 years. …
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