EVERETT – A U.S. senator this week promised to keep fighting for establishment of a veterans’ clinic in northwest Washington to ease access for tens of thousands of Snohomish County vets.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Nicholson promised establishment of such a facility last month when he visited Snohomish and Island counties.
“We have to have a clinic that is closer to home for veterans here in Snohomish County and all the way to Bellingham,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
Murray was in Everett on Thursday conducting a roundtable discussion on veterans’ concerns, including mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
“He made a promise to have a clinic, and we’re going to hold his feet to the fire and make sure that he will follow up on that,” Murray said.
Access to proper medical facilities was one issue raised at the discussion. Everett therapist Steve Akers noted that even the traffic between Snohomish County and current VA medical facilities in Seattle and Tacoma make access difficult. And the distance discourages people from traveling that far.
Akers has spent decades treating veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, and he said the 27,000 Vietnam vets in Snohomish County make it one of the highest concentrations of that war’s vets in the nation.
In addition, the area is seeing an increasing number of active-duty or reserve troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, said Dr. Stephen Hunt, director of the Deployment Health Clinic in Seattle, which treats combat veterans.
“There is no doubt people in this room who have been off to war, and they know how it can change your life,” Hunt said. “We feel it is important everyone is evaluated.”
Mental health problems may not become apparent for some time after a veteran returns, said Miles McFall, director of the federal post-traumatic stress disorder program in Seattle.
Anxiety, depression, insomnia and substance abuse are other problems that people who have seen combat often face.
Linda Gillespie-Gateley, a VA liaison with Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, said it’s important that mental health services are made available over time because service members often are too absorbed with returning to a normal life after coming home. They don’t pay attention immediately to what’s available.
“Sometimes when they come home they don’t hear the message,” she said.
Murray, who has been a persistent proponent of increased VA funding, said there’s a higher awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder program and other mental health problems today than following the Vietnam War, “but we still have a lot of holes to fill.”
Providers need to integrate services, and communities need to understand the mental health issues that many veterans face.
On a federal level, the VA has not looked “realistically at how many veterans are coming home and what kinds of services they need both physically and mentally,” Murray said.
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