“6,500 preventable deaths per year among a population that’s supposed to be receiving proper treatment for PTSD from the government, but isn’t,”

My feeling, after living with PTSD for most of my 60 years, is that there’s very little in the way of effective treatment, especially for survivors of severe/early/sadistic/multiple (choose one or all of the above) trauma. So it’s not surprising to me that the VA’s treatment isn’t working. Sometimes you simply can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The sooner we all get real about the fact that a lot of young people are going to return from war with an intractable, trauma-induced mental illness the sooner we can begin to *realistically* count the costs of war. Thus far we’ve moved from denial of its existance to wishful thinking about its amenability to treatment. I suppose that’s progress of a sort.

Good story, Becca.