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Suicidal Vet Put On Hold After Calling VA’s Crisis Hotline
Six months after losing his wife to cancer, U.S. Air Force veteran Ted Koran was ready to end it all. “I was missing my wife,” he said. So he turned to “the only place that I knew and that I had available to me, the VA.”
He called the James Haley VA Center in Tampa, and a recording gave him the 800 number to the Veterans Crisis Hotline.
However, after calling the number, Koran was put on hold for 10 minutes.
“I had to sit there patiently, in emotional distress, in tears, wanting to give up, desperately needing someone to talk to,” he said.
He hung up and called back twice before finally reaching a person. “They had me on the [verge] of saying to hell with it,” he said.
When he did finally reach a counselor, Koran said she did very little to help him.
In the end, he said it was the 60 animals he and his wife had rescued and cared for that made him reconsider taking his life. “My wife and I saved them, and they saved me,” he said.
Koran’s ordeal is not an isolated case. A Scripps national investigation recently found that calls to the crisis hotline often overload the system and are rerouted to other call centers where the calls are placed on hold.
One veteran recorded a call where he was put on hold for 36 minutes.
Another veteran with a history of PTSD called the crisis line and explained that she was spiraling mentally and had a suicide plan. She was transferred from person to person, put on hold for long periods of time, and eventually told someone would call her back.
No one ever did.
The next day, she got in her car, intending to drive it off a bridge; but she drove herself to a VA hospital instead, where she spent two weeks in treatment.
“If you’ve asked for help and they’re not able to help you expediently, quickly, efficiently, then there’s no point in having the hotline,” she said.
The Veterans Crisis Hotline was originally set up by the VA in 2007 and averaged 60 calls a day on four manned phone lines. Now, though, 52 operators at a time field around a thousand calls a day; and sometimes they can’t keep up, leading to rerouted calls and long wait times.
The VA has asked Congress for better technology and more funding to hire more staff, hoping this will allow them to fix the problems with the hotline within the next six months.
In the meantime, though, many more veterans will be left hanging at the time they are most vulnerable and desperately in need of someone to talk to.
Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., a veteran of the Army and Marine Corps and a member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, called the crisis line’s performance a “failure.” Veterans “are isolated and they’re alone and they’re fragile and they’re reaching out….because they’re at the end. And so there’s not anybody there,” he lamented. “How many veterans will lose their lives due to suicide in the time it takes them to unwind this bureaucracy?”
The VA estimates that 22 veterans commit suicide every day, about one every 65 minutes.
Koran is thankful that the animals he rescued ended up saving him, but acknowledges that not all veterans will be so lucky:
The very ones that are supposed to be there for me let me down.
This post originally appeared on Western Journalism – Equipping You With The Truth
Source: http://www.westernjournalism.com/suicidal-vet-put-on-hold-after-calling-vas-crisis-hotline/
