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Veterans and Mental Illness

On a sultry June morning in our national’s capital last Friday, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial . Scores of people moved silently along the Wall, viewing the names of the men and women who died in that war. Some stopped and took pictures. One group of men about my age surrounded one name for a photo. Two young women posed in front of another, perhaps a grandfather or great uncle they never got to meet. It is always an incredibly moving experience to visit the Wall. It treats each of the people it memorializes with respect. There is no rank among those honored. Officer or enlisted, rich or poor, each is given equal space and weight. It is a form of acknowledgement and respect for which many veterans still fight. Brave Vietnam veterans returned from Southeast Asia to educate our nation about the effects of war and violence. I didn’t know anything about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I entered the Connecticut Legislature in the late 1970s. I had only vag

Scapegoats and Concepts of a Plan: How Trump Fails Us

When a politician says he has “concepts of a plan” instead of a plan, there is no plan. And yet, that’s where we are with Donald Trump, nine years after he first launched a political campaign promising to replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better, nearly four years after he had four years to try to do just that. And fail. Doubling down during Tuesday’s debate, he claimed he had “concepts of a plan” to replace Obamacare. Really? He’s got nothing. In fact, he sounds just like Nixon sounded in 1968, when he claimed he had a “secret” plan to get us out of Vietnam. That turned out to be no plan at all (remember “Vietnamization?”) and cost us seven more years there and tens of thousands of lives. The Affordable Care Act, about which I wrote plenty in this blog a decade or more ago, wasn’t perfect. But it was a whole lot better than what we had before it – and anything (save a public option) that has been proposed since. Back then, insurers could deny coverage because of pre-exi

The Missing Mental Health Element in the Ferguson Story

By now, everyone has heard the news from Ferguson, Missouri. An unarmed 18 year old named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer. Michael Brown was black. Some of the events surrounding the shooting are in dispute. But what isn’t in dispute is that for the past two weeks, a community has been torn apart by race – a community that until recently was best known for its proximity to St. Louis and its designation as a Playful City, USA . Picture credit: Health Affairs Media reports since the August 9 th shooting have focused almost entirely on one angle – race relations. We’ve heard about unrest in the city, the National Guard, police in riot gear, and danger in the streets. We’ve heard about the District Attorney’s ties to law enforcement, and concerns that a too-white Grand Jury may be racially motivated not to indict the police officer involved in the deadly shooting. But the media have been strangely silent about a different angle – this comm

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