Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

By Mrs. MURRAY:

S. 3340. A bill to improve and enhance the programs and activities of the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs regarding suicide prevention and resilience and behavioral health disorders for members of the Armed Forces and veterans, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.

Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, last February, in my office in Seattle, I sat down with an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran named Stephen Davis and his wife Kim. Stephen and Kim were there to talk to me about their experiences since he returned home and about the invisible wounds of war they were struggling with together every single day.

At the meeting Kim did most of the talking. She told me about the nightmares. She told me about the lack of sleep. She talked about the confusion and the anxiety that was now a constant in their lives. But it was the way she summed up her experience since Stephen returned home that struck me hardest.

She said her husband still hadn't returned home. She said the husband she had been married to for nearly two decades--although he was sitting directly next to her--was still not back from the war.

Do you know what. Despite the fact that we often refer to these wounds as invisible, you could see it. When it came time for Stephen to describe to me his experiences, he shook as he explained how difficult the transition home has been for him, his wife, and for their family.

The Davis family's story is no different than what thousands of other families have faced. But their story does have a tragic and frustrating twist. You see, Sergeant Davis knew when he returned home that he had a problem with post-traumatic stress, and he was courageous enough to reach out for help. He sought care and he was diagnosed with PTSD.

But just a few months later, after a visit to Madigan Army Medical Base in my State of Washington, he was told something that shocked and appalled him and his wife. After just a 10-minute meeting and a written questionnaire, Sergeant Davis was told he was exaggerating his symptoms and he didn't have PTSD. He was told, in effect, that despite serving in two war zones, despite being involved in three separate IED incidents, and despite his repeated deployments, he was making it all up.

He was then sent home with a diagnosis of adjustment disorder and told his disability rating would be lowered and that the benefits he and his family would receive would ultimately be diminished. If this sounds like an isolated, shocking incident, here is something you will find even more shocking. Sergeant Davis was one of literally hundreds of patients at that Army hospital who were told the exact same thing.

Soldiers who had been diagnosed with PTSD--not just once but several times--had their diagnosis taken away. In many instances these soldiers were told they were embellishing or even outright lying about their symptoms. In fact, so many soldiers were being accused of making up symptoms by doctors at that hospital I began to get letters and phone calls from them to my office.

Soon after that, documents came to light showing that the doctors diagnosing these soldiers were being encouraged to consider not just the best diagnosis for their patients but also the cost of care. These revelations have led to a series of internal investigations that are still underway today. Even more important, they have led to these soldiers now, thankfully, being reevaluated, and today hundreds of these soldiers, including Sergeant Davis, have had their proper PTSD diagnosis restored.

This, too, could be viewed as an isolated incident. In fact, when I first raised concerns, the problems we saw at Madigan could be happening at other bases across the country, that is exactly what I was told--it was an isolated incident at one base, at one hospital. But I knew better.

I remembered back to this Salon article that ran a few years ago. In that article, a doctor from Fort Carson in Colorado talked about how he was ``under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD.''

It went on to quote a former Army psychologist named David Rudd, who said:

Each diagnosis is an acknowledgement that psychiatric casualties are a huge price tag of this war. It is easiest to dismiss these casualties because you can't see the wounds. If they change the diagnosis, they can dismiss you at a substantially decreased rate.

Madam President, I also had my own staff launch an investigation into how the military and the VA were diagnosing mental health conditions at other bases across our country, and I was very troubled by what I found.

It became clear that there were other cases where doctors accused soldiers of exaggerating symptoms without any documentation of appropriate interview techniques. They encountered inadequate VA medical examinations, especially in relation to traumatic brain injury. They found that many VA rating decisions contained errors, which in some cases complicated the level of benefits that veterans should have received.

Now, to their credit, the Army did not run and hide as the questions about other bases continued to mount. In fact, they have now taken two important steps. First, in April, they issued a new policy for diagnosing PTSD that criticized the methods being used at Madigan and pointed out to health officials throughout the entire system that it was unlikely that soldiers were faking these symptoms. Then, in May, the Army went further and announced they would review all mental health diagnoses across the country dating back to 2001. That, in turn, has led Secretary Panetta to announce just last week that all branches of the military are now going to undergo a similar review.

Without question, these are historic steps in our efforts to right a decade of inconsistencies in how the invisible wounds of war have been evaluated. Servicemembers, veterans, and their families should never have to wade through an unending bureaucratic process. Because of this outcry from veterans and servicemembers alike, the Pentagon now has an extraordinary opportunity to go back and correct the mistakes of the past.

We have to make sure these mistakes are never repeated. We still need to fundamentally change a system that Secretary Panetta admitted to me last week has ``huge gaps'' in it.

That is why I am here this evening. Today, I am introducing the Mental Health ACCESS Act of 2012. It is a bill that seeks to make improvements to make sure that those who have served have access to consistent, quality behavioral health care.

It is a bill that strengthens oversight of military mental health care and improves the integrated disability evaluation system on which we rely. As anyone who understands these issues knows well, this is not an easy task. The mental health care, suicide prevention, and counseling programs we provide our servicemembers are spread throughout this entire Department of Defense and the VA. Too often they are entangled in a web of bureaucracy and, frankly, too often this makes them difficult to address in legislation.

In crafting this bill I identified critical changes that need to be made at both the Department of Defense and the VA, and I set up a checklist of legislative changes needed to do just that. Some provisions in the bill will likely be addressed in my Veterans Committee. Others will need to be addressed through Defense bills and work with the chairs of those committees. But all of these provisions are critical, and today I want to share with you some of the most important ones.

High atop the list of changes this bill makes is addressing military suicides which, as we all know, is an epidemic that now outpaces combat deaths in this country. My bill will require the Pentagon to create comprehensive standardized suicide prevention programs. It would also require the Department to better oversee mental health services for servicemembers.

It will expand eligibility for a variety of VA mental health services to family members so we can help families and spouses to cope with the stress of deployment and strengthen the support network that is critical to servicemembers who are returning from deployment.

Third, my bill will improve training and education for our health care providers. Oftentimes our servicemembers seek out help from chaplains, medics, or others who may be unprepared to offer counseling. This bill will help prepare them through continuing education programs.

Fourth, my bill will create more peer-to-peer counseling opportunities. It would do it by requiring VA to offer peer support services at all medical centers and by supporting opportunities to train vets to provide peer services.

Finally, this bill will require VA to establish accurate and reliable measures for mental health services. This will help ensure that the VA understands the problems they face so that veterans can get into the care we know they can provide.

All of these are critical steps at a pivotal time, because the truth is, right now the Department of Defense and the VA are losing the battle against the mental and behavioral wounds of these wars.

To see that, you don't need to look any farther than the tragic fact that already this year over 150 active-duty servicemembers have taken their own lives or the fact that one veteran commits suicide in this country every 80 minutes. And while we all know there are a number of factors that contribute to suicide--repeated deployments, lack of employment security, isolation in their communities, and difficulty transitioning back to their families--not having access to quality and timely mental health care is vital.

When our veterans cannot get the care they need, they often self-medicate. When they wait endlessly for a proper diagnosis, they lose hope. Last year at this time, I held a hearing in my veterans committee on the mental health disability system this bill seeks to strengthen, and I heard two stories that illustrate that despair.

Andrea Sawyer, the wife of Army SGT Lloyd Sawyer, testified about her husband, who is an Iraq veteran and spent years searching for care. Together, they hit barriers and they hit redtape so often that at one point, she said, he held a knife to his throat in front of both her and an Army psychiatrist before being talked out of it.

Later, in that very same hearing, Daniel Williams, an Iraq combat veteran, testified about how his struggle to find care led him to stick the gun in his mouth while his wife begged him to stop, only to see his gun misfire.

Those are the stories that define this problem. These are men and women we must be there for. They have served and sacrificed and done everything this country has asked of them. They have left their families, left their homes. They have served multiple times and protected our Nation's interests at home and abroad. This bill will make a difference for them, but we have to make these changes now.

Today I am asking Members of the Senate from both sides of the aisle to please join me in this effort. We owe our veterans a medical evaluation system that treats them fairly, that gives them the proper diagnosis, and that provides access to the mental health care they have earned and they deserve. We need to join together to get this legislation passed, and I ask every Member of the Senate to help me get this through. It is critical, as thousands of men and women come home today and thousands of them are waiting on care.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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