Not only is
this a tragic story. The way in which the VA handled his case is
reprehensible:
http://counterpunch.org/clinton10052004.html
"As Jeff spiraled toward
self-destruction, he began to drink more and more. In early June, his desperate parents were able to arrange an
involuntary commitment to a local veterans' hospital, where Lucey complained that he was treated like "a
prisoner."
He was diagnosed as suffering from depression with secondary alcohol dependency--and was released
after four days because, the hospital said, he was not a danger to himself or others. On the ride home, he told his
parents that he had met with psychiatrists twice, both times briefly, and on the second occasion, the psychiatrist
had seem preoccupied with other matters.
In many respects, Jeff's fate followed a trajectory that is
becoming all too familiar. As Nancy Lessin of Military Families Speak Out told Amy Goodman, "We have heard so much
about what this military has learned in Vietnam [about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder], and how they're doing it
differently now. And we don't see that at all. We see the same mistakes happening--mistakes that are, in fact, not
mistakes at all. It's really a way of denying this issue so they can keep as many warm bodies deployed and
re-deployed."
After Jeff's death, his parents learned from the medical records kept during his involuntary
confinement that he had told nurses of three different plans to kill himself--a drug overdose, suffocation or
hanging. On June 22, he chose the last of these three methods, hanging himself with a hose in the basement of his
parents' home."
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