Military & VeteransDr. Anand Veeravagu says that it is the mission of the DoD and the VA to continue to put combat-related mental health issues at the forefront of care.
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[brainlinemilitary - A service of brainline.org] [Anand Veeravagu, MD - Neurosurgeon, Stanford University, White House Fellow, Dept. of Defense] With traumatic brain injury and mental health, the VAs have really taken a big role in addressing the ability to diagnose and also to treat patients who feel that they may not have had access to care before. And I think that has been very evident in probably the last 6 to 8 months, just in the time that I've been in Washington, with the number of initiatives and collaborative initiatives that have come out between the DoD and the VA. Mental health is a very high priority for both service secretaries, and so I think over the course of the next several years we will see that VAs are very powerful in deploying mental health resources to the community, specifically the veteran community, but at a local level, which is where this kind of care should really occur, because folks are probably going to be working, they have families, and making sure that you deploy mental health resources in a setting that doesn't disrupt the lives of service members who are trying to start again from a deployed state now to a civilian state is really important. And I think, in my opinion, it appears to be very important both to the VA and to the DoD to make sure that mental health is in the forefront of care now.
Posted on BrainLine October 21, 2013.
About the author: Anand Veeravagu, MD
Anand Veeravagu, MD is a neurosurgeon in training at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a former White House fellow and special assistant to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. He previously served as chief neurosurgery resident at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Hospital.
Produced by Christian Lindstrom and Justin Rhodes, BrainLine.