Department of Veterans Affairs blamed for failing to help Iraq, Afghan veterans

On June 11, 2006, at 8:30 p.m., Randen Harvey, a 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran, walked into the emergency room of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Ann Arbor in such a state of despair he warned he "might jump off the roof or put a hose in his car exhaust."

Four hours later, around 1 a.m., he was found on the roof of the nine-story building. Hospital security had to be called to bring him down.

Three days later, on June 15, the Marine who served two back-to-back combat tours in Iraq surrendered to his demons. He was found sprawled on the tile floor in the bathroom of his father’s Farmington Hills home, dead from an overdose of street and prescription drugs.

Several branches of the military are reporting significant spikes in the number of suicides committed by both active-duty troops and veterans returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Experts are calling the number of military-related suicides sweeping the country an "epidemic."

Survivors of veterans who committed suicide are starting to file lawsuits, accusing the VA of medical malpractice. The agency also has come under attack by lawmakers and veterans’ groups charging that it failed to treat injured veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury, the signature wounds of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The agency also has been accused of manipulating suicide statistics to downplay the problem and systematically misdiagnosing returning combat soldiers who suffer mental illness because their resources are tapped.

"We are murdering our own children here," said the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., in an interview with The Detroit News.

"The tragedy is we could have predicted this, what with multiple deployments, the type of urban warfare and the almost inevitable killing of innocent people. Now we have an epidemic on our hands. This is a national disgrace."

Veterans groups say they are bracing for a flood of soldiers coming home from Iraq to a Veterans Affairs system that is ill-equipped to treat them and a country in the grips of a recession with few or no jobs to offer soldiers.

Harvey was honorably discharged less than seven months before he committed suicide. He came home only to find he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t stand to be in public, couldn’t stay sober and couldn’t be around the family who loved him.

The night he was found on the roof of the hospital, he told a VA psychiatrist: "I am at the end of my rope. Things would be much easier if I weren’t here." But because Harvey had failed a Breathalyzer test, he was discharged.The following morning Harvey returned to the hospital and was examined by Dr. Brian Martis, associate director of psychiatry at the Ann Arbor VA. Harvey told the psychiatrist he felt "hopeless" and "ashamed." Still, Harvey was not admitted to the hospital.

Instead, the veteran who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, agoraphobia, panic anxiety disorder and alcohol abuse — the same patient who had tried to commit suicide two months prior and who, only hours earlier, had been talked down from the hospital roof — was, in Martis’ words, "not certifiable" — hospital code for not sick enough to be involuntarily committed.

In a lawsuit, Harvey’s family claims that Veterans Affairs, the organization President Abraham Lincoln said was charged "to care for him who shall have borne the battle," failed to keep him from taking his own life.

His mother, Jackie Green of Brooklyn, filed the medical malpractice and wrongful death lawsuit against the Department of Veterans Affairs in U.S. District Court in Detroit.

Officials at the Ann Arbor Veteran Affairs facility where her son sought help, declined to comment for this story because the case is in litigation.

Source: The Detroit News