In discussing alternative pain treatments to improve suicide prevention, Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie painted a picture of his Vietnam veteran father, who suffered from PTSD following grave injuries deep in the jungles of Cambodia.
“My father was terribly wounded in the invasion of Cambodia,” he said, before offering an imaginary VA conversation with his father. “You know what, Major? … We’re going to get to the source of that combat pain through Yoga and music therapy and water therapy.”
He paused before delivering the next line to a group of reporters at the National Press Club on Wednesday: “My nose would be flat against my face.”
Wilkie said preventing suicide among veterans will require creative pain treatments that have proven to be effective but may have been laughed off by veterans a generation ago. “It’s contrary to the ethos of the warrior,” he said. “We’re changing the culture of the military mindset.”
Twenty veterans take their own lives each day, Wilkie said, explaining that bolstering suicide prevention efforts will mean better addressing homelessness, addiction, and mental health. “We are in the middle of a long-overdue national conversation on veterans’ suicide.”
The department spends $9.5 billion on mental health, but the issue remains challenging, Wilkie said. “It is the last frontier in medicine. We are not even at the sputnik stage when it comes to that issue.”
Wilkie talked about some of the methods being used to control pain management and emotion.
“Veterans with PTSD are often not able to process the emotions related to a traumatic experience in the field,” he said. In partnership with the University of Southern California and the nonprofit group Soldier Strong, the VA is applying virtual reality to both. Applied VR in a controlled setting allows clinicians to help veterans process those emotions and block pain signals from reaching the brain, he said.
Sixty percent of veterans who take their lives have no contact with the VA, Wilkie said. Reducing suicides will require targeting veterans who are difficult to reach. He gave the examples of how Catholic Charities and other organizations have offered to walk the streets of cities such as New Orleans, Atlanta, and Houston, talking to veterans and connecting them to services that can help.
The effort has reduced the number of homeless veterans from hundreds of thousands to under 40,000. “We know it works in that sense; we need to have it work for suicide,” he said.
The VA screened more than 4 million at-risk veterans in the last year and a half and took 1,700 hotline calls per day.
