Veterans Exposed to Trauma Assistance:
We Heal as a Community
Our mission is to facilitate community- based healing for traumatized veterans.
VET Assistance is a non-profit organization committed to helping all veterans who experience duty-related trauma heal in a manner that best suits their needs.
Most veterans with Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD) and PTSD-type symptoms are not getting the help they need. The reasons for this are numerous, including the following:
- missing key information about cause of PTSD
- mental health associated stigma
- lack of clear treatment goals
- inability to access care
Duty-related PTSD:
- Effects highly competent, caring professionals trapped in unexpected, horrific, “no win” circumstances.
- Symptoms of PTSD are caused by the effects of trauma on the primitive brain’s emotional memory system.
- PTSD, the diagnosis, is caused by a lack of natural recovery; those with PTSD were never taught the Traumatic Stress Recovery skills needed to facilitate natural recovery.
Ideally Traumatic Stress Recovery skills are taught to high risk professionals prior to being traumatized. These skills can, however, be learned months, years, or even decades after a trauma has occurred.
Traumatic Stress Recovery Training teaches veterans, family members and others at high risk for suffering as a result of duty- related horrific events, essential traumatic stress recovery skills.
Advantages of TSRT:
Non-stigmatizing: Mental health associated stigma is the main reason traumatized professionals avoid treatment.
- Uses non-judgmental, non-clinical terms; PTSD symptoms result of ‘doing ones job.’
- Recovery is connected to learning to use specific competency based skills.
- These skills need to be learned by all at risk professionals and their loved ones.
Facilitates Hope: Feeling of hopelessness and helplessness are strongly connected to the high number of suicides and “high risk” deaths among traumatized professionals.
- PTSD is not a logical problem. People are unable to fix a problem if missing, ‘key, essential information
- Specific concrete goals/end points. Mental health is often vague regarding long term goals. TSRT sets specific, defined, obtainable goals for “cure.”
- Builds on what many at risk professionals intuitively know to be true.
Facilitates community-based care: The current standard of care for veterans with PTSD emphasizes only the patient (veteran) who receives standardized treatments in an inpatient or outpatient mental health facility.
TSRT encourages community based care by:
- Emphasizing natural recovery is a two person effort – involving a family member or another trusted person in their community
- Teaching competency based self-help skills; skills that can be used at home in a setting where a veteran feels most comfortable.
- Encouraging all members of our communities to help transform how we collectively talk about unexpected, duty related trauma.