A new report highlights the gaps in women veterans’ mental health care
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Ginger MacCutcheon had plans to spend decades as a military medic in the Women’s Army Corps. She enlisted right out of high school, leaving northeast Ohio at the age of 18.
“I went off to boot camp dressed in a suit with matching luggage and shoes, just like Private Benjamin would go,” MacCutcheon said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, this is a great adventure I’m going on.’”
That dream was cut short. MacCutcheon was raped repeatedly by commanding officers. The sexual harassment followed her from base to base. Years passed before she felt safe enough to confide in a colleague and was honorably discharged.
In the years following her departure from the military, MacCutcheon attempted suicide twice.
“They discharge you and let you go with no idea of how you're going to help yourself or get help. Nobody says anything,” MacCutcheon said.
Veterans are at higher risk for suicide than civilians. And the rate for women veterans has risen more sharply than that for their male counterparts. It jumped more than 20% between 2020 and 2021.
The nonprofit Disabled American Veterans (DAV) says women veterans need more support for their unique mental health needs. A third of them experience military sexual trauma. Female veterans are more likely to experience intimate partner violence and have an eating disorder. All three can lead to a greater risk of suicide.
But, the VA doesn’t factor in all of these risks in their mental health outreach and intervention, according to Naomi Mathis, policy advocate with the nonprofit Disabled American Veterans, or DAV.
“The VA was not created with women in mind,” Mathis said.
Changing the baseline
Mathis said the VA created a model for assessing risk of suicide that’s based on men; it doesn’t include military sexual trauma (MST), which disproportionately impacts women.
She argues that makes the more than 60,000 female veterans in Ohio more likely to slip through the cracks. Especially, she said, because many of them don’t see themselves as veterans eligible for care. They don’t see the VA as serving them.
“That's common, very common among our women veterans, particularly the ones that served during an era when they were getting kicked out just for being pregnant,” Mathis said.
“The VA was not created with women in mind."
Naomi Mathis, Air Force veteran and DAV policy advocate
Mathis worked with veterans like MacCutcheon to shed light on the gaps, resulting in a report with more than 50 recommendations of how the VA could better serve the mental health needs of women. It recommends increasing screening for military sexual trauma and investing in research into the effect of menopause on PTSD.
“We believe also that MST [screenings] should be the central pillar of suicide prevention efforts within the VA,” Mathis said.
The VA did not respond by deadline to a request for comment. But the DAV report did acknowledge the administration has made strides in its women-centered mental health programming.
In recent years, the VA has invested in significant research on PTSD in women and expanded outreach. At every VA facility, there is a Women’s Mental Health Champion, a mental health clinician with expertise on treating women veterans.
Gender-exclusive care
Still, Mathis said the VA needs to increase its offerings to meet the needs of the growing number of women who are turning to them for help. She said it should consider expanding its gender-exclusive PTSD care options. There’s only 13 VA gender-exclusive residential rehabilitation facilities across the country, according to the DAV report.
The Cincinnati VA is one of them. Kate Chard is the director of the the PTSD programs in its medical center, where they’ve seen an increase in the number of women seeking out residential care. She said treatment for PTSD in men and women largely looks the same, but women feel more comfortable talking about their experiences of sexual trauma in female-only spaces.
Plus, she said, they can address how reproductive health impacts their healing.
“We know that PTSD is linked to where you are in your menstrual cycle and that you may have more symptoms,” Chard said. “And so those were important things to be able to talk to women about and have them understand their bodies and their biology in a way that's different from men.”
Regaining hope
The VA has succeeded in helping veterans like MacCutcheon. The Cleveland VA connected her to counseling and to a woman’s support group. She said it gave her hope again, for the first time since she was a teenager.
“That was how my recovery started,” MacCutcheon said. “It took years to realize that it wasn't my fault. Because I still carried that with me.”
She became a nurse, a commissioner for the Summit County Veterans Service and the commander of the DAV Chapter 116 in Parma. She organized veteran appreciation days, trained service dogs, and most importantly, she said, she always picked up the phone for a peer in need.
She died recently, from unrelated health issues, at the age of 65, having dedicated her life to helping others find treatment.
“It is an issue that we need help with. And we can't stop striving to get people the help that they need or make it available. We have to do better,” MacCutcheon said.
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