Ptsd In Veterans

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is often looked upon as leaving a wounded soldier behind. Whether their wound is physical or mental they need continual quality care. When a soldier comes home from war and is discharged, they face a whole new challenge they are not expecting and that is seeking treatment through the VA. In the beginning a veteran had to go through a lot in order to prove they had PTSD, Recently the VA has changed those policies making it easier for a veteran to make a claim and seek care, but, as stated in an article anonymously written titled PTSD: Caring for Our Vets "While the disability claims system overall remains ill-equipped and outdated, this is a step in the right direction," by a veterans group. Legislation and …show more content…
According to Tick (2013) “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is what results when your head tells you to do what your heart knows is wrong” (p. 18). Reading in this article you can truly grasp what PTSD is and how deeply it has affected our veterans from all wars. Today we face about 18 veterans committing suicide daily many struggling with PTSD or other mental illness, The question then is how do we help our veterans seek treatment and what treatments are aiming to help them succeed? Two of the newer therapies offered through the Department of Veterans Affairs or VA is Prolonged Exposure Therapy and Cognitive Processing Therapy both of these therapies involve facing the trauma and learning in different ways how to gain control over the condition as well as their lives. By using these therapies the VA is showing how they are moving forward with new options to assist in healing our …show more content…
The idea is to show the veteran that they can face their pain and learn to control their reaction to the events. If you ask a veteran what takes them back to the trauma they may all have different triggers, but the one thing they have in common is that no matter what it is there are a trigger and by learning to control the reaction to them it eases the pain. Looking at Cognitive Processing Therapy or CPT the approach is in a group setting so that veterans work together as a team to face all the aspects of their condition and talk through their issues together. CPT would seem more fitting for those who do well in more social settings, whereas, PE is more for those who need one on one and do not thrive in group settings. Along with either of these programs the patient would need medication to help control the depression that often follows