In the 1980's, I stopped going to the VA at 50 Irving Street in Washington, DC due to the incompetence.
There then, they had these huge towers of plastic holding thousands of pills.
The technicians would pour them into bags and hand them to the lines of Vets who stared glassy eyed from the mind altering drugs they were being administered.
It was a hard scene to observe when visiting.
Back then, they had 27 cigarette machines in the lobby.
None of the doctors spoke American English. Mine was Russian and I could barely understand him.
I got so tired of the wasted hours waiting to see a doctor and cancelled pre-appointments.
What made me finally stop using the VA was that I had an ingrown toenail cut out next to a guy who was having his foot removed. Blood everywhere.
I could go on with tales of horror but it made me use private health care for 40 years.
Then, in 2018, a guy told me Trump fired 10,000 corrupt VA employees and things had improved.
I went to the clinic at Ft. Dietrich and he was right. Things had changed.
But with the current administration, the corruption and laziness has returned.
It is a make work project. You go for an appointment, and 5 intake employees are in each department when only 1 is necessary.
After November 6th, hopefully it will go back to being the efficient organization is was for one brief shining moment.
BTW...please use PTSI (Post Trauma Stress Injury) rather than PTSD.
Injuries, mental and physical, can be healed. When you use "disorder" as the VA does, people think of mental and sexual disorders subconsciously.
Words have power.
It makes a huge difference, even if the VA refuses to change the designation...and labelling.
There is a reason the number one place for Vet suicides are in VA parking lots.
Changing PTSD to PTSI can help reverse that horrible statistic.
How about instead we do change it to PTSI to make a difference in the recovery of millions of Vets who have been medically mislabeled, destroyed by the psychotropic pills the VA hands out like candy to numb them out, mistreated, abused and suffered due to this one word: disorder?
But why take my word for it.
Tom Glenn, world-class NSA spy in Vietnam for 13 years and the last man out of Saigon in that horrible evacuation, says it better.
Please never use the term Post Trauma Delayed Stress Disorder (PTSD) to describe this condition.
It is not a disorder. It is an injury.
This is a critical difference to know if you ever deal with anyone who has it from combat in war, rape, or as the victim of pedophiles or criminal predators. Here is why.
A disorder assumes the person who has it is responsible for the disorder.
An injury is outside the control of the person who has it.
You recover from an injury. You have a very difficult life if you have a disorder.
The great career NSA analyst, combat veteran, author, and patriot Tom Glenn explains it better than I can.
"I mentioned in an earlier post that I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress. I’ve been pushing as hard as I can to change the nomenclature from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). My point is that the disease is not an internal system gone awry but an externally inflicted wound. The “disorder” label reinforces the notion that strong and brave men don’t suffer from it; only the weak and cowardly do. I find a strong strain among the military who dismiss PTSI as cowardice. It’s obvious to me that it is as much a wound (Ron Capps calls it a wound to the soul) as any physical laceration. The difference is, it never heals."
"I mentioned in an earlier post that I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress. I’ve been pushing as hard as I can to change the nomenclature from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). My point is that the disease is not an internal system gone awry but an externally inflicted wound. The “disorder” label reinforces the notion that strong and brave men don’t suffer from it; only the weak and cowardly do. I find a strong strain among the military who dismiss PTSI as cowardice. It’s obvious to me that it is as much a wound (Ron Capps calls it a wound to the soul) as any physical laceration. The difference is, it never heals."
I listened to your Army experiences and wanted to let you know that when I was on active duty my son also joined in the same career field. Out BMTS is a Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas. My tech school was at Lowry AFB in Denver, Colorado. By the time my son joined the Air Force had moved tech training to Lackland, so my son went to tech training there. His first and only assignment was to Davis Monthan AFB, in Tucson, Arizona. He tried many times to go to another location but he spent ten years in and never got to move anywhere else. To this day it does not make sense to me how that happened because I moved many times. I thought the Army was not fair to you by not letting you experience more. Just my thoughts...
this is only the tip of the iceberg. VA contractors filed for PPP and were multi-million dollar entities. This program provides small businesses with funds to pay up to 8 weeks of payroll costs including benefits. Volunteers of America obtained $81,786,250 and all was "forgiven."
True that.
In the 1980's, I stopped going to the VA at 50 Irving Street in Washington, DC due to the incompetence.
There then, they had these huge towers of plastic holding thousands of pills.
The technicians would pour them into bags and hand them to the lines of Vets who stared glassy eyed from the mind altering drugs they were being administered.
It was a hard scene to observe when visiting.
Back then, they had 27 cigarette machines in the lobby.
None of the doctors spoke American English. Mine was Russian and I could barely understand him.
I got so tired of the wasted hours waiting to see a doctor and cancelled pre-appointments.
What made me finally stop using the VA was that I had an ingrown toenail cut out next to a guy who was having his foot removed. Blood everywhere.
I could go on with tales of horror but it made me use private health care for 40 years.
Then, in 2018, a guy told me Trump fired 10,000 corrupt VA employees and things had improved.
I went to the clinic at Ft. Dietrich and he was right. Things had changed.
But with the current administration, the corruption and laziness has returned.
It is a make work project. You go for an appointment, and 5 intake employees are in each department when only 1 is necessary.
After November 6th, hopefully it will go back to being the efficient organization is was for one brief shining moment.
BTW...please use PTSI (Post Trauma Stress Injury) rather than PTSD.
Injuries, mental and physical, can be healed. When you use "disorder" as the VA does, people think of mental and sexual disorders subconsciously.
Words have power.
It makes a huge difference, even if the VA refuses to change the designation...and labelling.
There is a reason the number one place for Vet suicides are in VA parking lots.
Changing PTSD to PTSI can help reverse that horrible statistic.
Sorry you had to experience that, big changes are needed though i'm not sure they are coming any time soon.
Thanks dude I appreciate that
How about just keeping it PTSD? I’d think after the past few years, people would be smart enough to understand changing a name changes nothing.
How about instead we do change it to PTSI to make a difference in the recovery of millions of Vets who have been medically mislabeled, destroyed by the psychotropic pills the VA hands out like candy to numb them out, mistreated, abused and suffered due to this one word: disorder?
But why take my word for it.
Tom Glenn, world-class NSA spy in Vietnam for 13 years and the last man out of Saigon in that horrible evacuation, says it better.
https://www.wmar2news.com/voiceforveterans/army-veteran-former-nsa-spy-writes-to-cope-with-trauma-from-vietnam-war
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Annamese-Tom-Glenn-ebook/dp/B06WD6M5DC?ref_=ast_author_dp
Please never use the term Post Trauma Delayed Stress Disorder (PTSD) to describe this condition.
It is not a disorder. It is an injury.
This is a critical difference to know if you ever deal with anyone who has it from combat in war, rape, or as the victim of pedophiles or criminal predators. Here is why.
A disorder assumes the person who has it is responsible for the disorder.
An injury is outside the control of the person who has it.
You recover from an injury. You have a very difficult life if you have a disorder.
The great career NSA analyst, combat veteran, author, and patriot Tom Glenn explains it better than I can.
"I mentioned in an earlier post that I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress. I’ve been pushing as hard as I can to change the nomenclature from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). My point is that the disease is not an internal system gone awry but an externally inflicted wound. The “disorder” label reinforces the notion that strong and brave men don’t suffer from it; only the weak and cowardly do. I find a strong strain among the military who dismiss PTSI as cowardice. It’s obvious to me that it is as much a wound (Ron Capps calls it a wound to the soul) as any physical laceration. The difference is, it never heals."
Well, if you sit around and wallow in it, it never will “heal”.
Gotta try to help yourself, too.
Changing the name does absolutely nothing but sound like a line from the woke
As you wish.
"I mentioned in an earlier post that I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress. I’ve been pushing as hard as I can to change the nomenclature from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI). My point is that the disease is not an internal system gone awry but an externally inflicted wound. The “disorder” label reinforces the notion that strong and brave men don’t suffer from it; only the weak and cowardly do. I find a strong strain among the military who dismiss PTSI as cowardice. It’s obvious to me that it is as much a wound (Ron Capps calls it a wound to the soul) as any physical laceration. The difference is, it never heals."
I listened to your Army experiences and wanted to let you know that when I was on active duty my son also joined in the same career field. Out BMTS is a Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas. My tech school was at Lowry AFB in Denver, Colorado. By the time my son joined the Air Force had moved tech training to Lackland, so my son went to tech training there. His first and only assignment was to Davis Monthan AFB, in Tucson, Arizona. He tried many times to go to another location but he spent ten years in and never got to move anywhere else. To this day it does not make sense to me how that happened because I moved many times. I thought the Army was not fair to you by not letting you experience more. Just my thoughts...
Appreciate it!
Thank you for the share
The VA, like anything else federal, is a system designed to defeat itself.
The answer? Give us more money next year so we can unfuck a department that has no direction, responsibility, or accountability.
And don’t even get me started on the mountains of money the military pisses away every year by intentionally destroying perfectly good equipment.
But wait...there's more...
@VetAffairsOIG
this is only the tip of the iceberg. VA contractors filed for PPP and were multi-million dollar entities. This program provides small businesses with funds to pay up to 8 weeks of payroll costs including benefits. Volunteers of America obtained $81,786,250 and all was "forgiven."
Who says crime doesn’t pay?