Future
Learning to Live with Trauma
Therapy and arts have helped many of the veterans. But they emphasize the need for methods where the veterans are treated as individuals, each as a unique case. PTSD victims want individual care, but often the care works like an institutional machinery, with expectations that the same pattern fits everyone. Mary-Ann Rich, like many others, has found it difficult to accept therapy.
Help is available from the VA and other institutions. Finding it and having strength to look for it, is a different story. Lt. Col. Mary-Ann Rich was first turned away from the VA for bureaucratic reasons because of her reservist status.
Many veterans recognize their symptoms only months or years after serving, which makes it more difficult to look for help from the military health institutions. All of the interviewed veterans in this story want to use their profound experience to help others, recognizing there will be a flood of traumatized veterans living in the U.S.A. over the next few years.
You don't yet see many of the veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom living on the streets. Young veterans may sleep on a friend's couch or in their car, quietly, privately dealing with their past as a wounded soldier, but with no visible injuries, says clinical director Bill Wallace of the U.S. Vets in Long Beach. But there is a danger and fear of a new Vietnam-like generation ending up on the streets within a few years, if there is no safety net to catch them if they fall.
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