In the recent years, the number of mental health professionals providing for the military has dwindled, there is almost no combat-specific psychologists left, and the wait time to be treated for a mental health issue by the Department of Veterans Affairs has drastically increased. Examining MilitaryOneSource and the Department of Veterans Affairs, two of the most highly regarded military health providers, the lack of mental health services for veterans and active duty members has diminished and has resulted in a multitude of veterans going untreated or even ending their own life instead of receiving the help they …show more content…
In order to categorize the priority of a patient’s necessities, the VA has implemented a series of tiers that rank veterans into groups in order to classify their severity of need (“Removing Barriers to Mental Health Services for Veterans”). Typically, those that are experiencing mental health concerns will be ranked in the bottom two tiers, leaving them stranded without care for months at a time. Within the VA in the last year, there was currently upwards of 500,000 appointments that were waitlisted with delays totaling longer than 30 days (Griffin, Drew, Nelli Black, Scott Bronstein, and Curt Devine). Although there is currently an influx of patients seeking treatment at VA health clinics, the number of patients being waitlisted throughout the past year has augmented up to fifty percent, meaning those that are pursuing mental health care through military benefactors can end up waiting up to six months without treatment. Statistically proven, the rates of mental and emotional suffering experienced by American veterans is excessively high, meaning that the obstructions to care for them after reentering the civilian world puts them in a further