As a vet I can tell you all healthcare for vets is a joke. And mental health? LOL! The public, press and government can pay as much lip service as they want to

As a vet I can tell you all healthcare for vets is a joke. And mental health? LOL! The public, press and government can pay as much lip service as they want toward "caring" for their veterans. But that's all it is. Some momentary hand waving and noise whilst there's a new story making the circuit about the most recent veteran failure. Five minutes go by and it's a forgotten issue again. We've treated service members as consumables publicly since the Vietnam war. For those who come back broken, not much has changed since 1955. I know a lot of messed up vets. I've watched them struggle with their issues while fighting a broken, uncaring system. I've been aware of many enlisted suicides over the years. I know when I was self destructing I was lucky to be in a really good financial position and have a caring and resilient significant other. Without those two things clearing paths for me (which has still been a disappointing, frustrating slog) I'm pretty confident I wouldn't be here right now. If I had to rely on the VA or any other "programs" I probably would have ended up scrambling my own brains about 4-6 years ago.