VA medical records don't mention that veteran felt suicidal

[thedrifter]

Last update: February 04, 2007 – 9:24 PM
VA medical records don't mention that veteran felt suicidal
Jonathan J. Schulze's father and stepmother say they heard him tell St. Cloud hospital staff that he was thinking of killing himself.

By Kevin Giles, Star Tribune
Records from the Veterans Medical Center in St. Cloud indicate that Marine veteran Jonathan J. Schulze didn't tell staff members that he was suicidal -- as his family has alleged -- when he asked to be admitted to the hospital's psychiatric unit.

His father and stepmother, Jim and Marianne Schulze, maintain that the records are not accurate.

They say they heard him tell hospital staff members on two occasions that he was thinking of killing himself, just days before he committed suicide in his New Prague home on Jan. 16.

"The most disturbing part for me is their denial of Jon's suicidal condition," said Jim Schulze, who has read nearly 400 pages of records, most relating to his son's psychological counseling at the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center after he returned from a seven-month tour of duty in Iraq during 2004.

But the Schulzes also say that the records show a troubled, emotionally distraught combat veteran who still seemed to be fighting the war in Iraq even after he left the Marines.

Veterans Administration officials in Minnesota can't comment on the records or their dealings with Jonathan Schulze, said Joan Vincent, the VA's public affairs officer in St. Cloud.

"We need to maintain the privacy of this veteran," she said Friday.

Schulze's suicide has drawn the attention of national veterans groups and members of Congress, who question whether the VA is prepared to handle the mental health needs of the growing number of Iraq war veterans. U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said Schulze's case "may indicate systemic problems in VA's capacity to identify, monitor, and treat veterans who are suicidal."

The case is being investigated by a medical inspector and a clinical psychologist from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. They were expected to conclude their visits to the St. Cloud and Minneapolis veterans hospitals this past Friday, said Matt Burns, a spokesman in Washington.

Burns said no such "comprehensive on-site investigation" had been done in Minnesota for at least five years. About 10 investigations are done elsewhere each year, he said.

4 pages on two conversations

Jim Schulze, of rural Stewart, Minn., obtained his son's records through the Minneapolis VA office and shared some of them with the Star Tribune. Four pages of the records pertain to two conversations with staff at the St. Cloud veterans hospital in which Schulze's father and his stepmother say he told staff members that he was suicidal.

The first document, from Jan. 11, notes only that Schulze came to St. Cloud to ask for screening for chemical dependency treatment and was referred to a clinical social worker.

Jim and Marianne Schulze said that record fails to mention that Jonathan told a staff member that he was thinking of killing himself -- which Marianne said she witnessed -- and asked to be admitted to the mental health unit. They said he came to the hospital with his clothes packed but was turned away.

A document from Jan. 12, when Schulze spoke with a counselor over the phone from his father's farmhouse, indicated that he was asked about suicide.

Under the category, "Having/had suicidal ideation/attempts," the counselor wrote: "no/no."

Ideation is a clinical term referring to thoughts or inclinations.

Marianne Schulze said that she heard Jonathan's side of the conversation as he sat on the living room couch and that he clearly told the counselor he felt suicidal. He told her, after hanging up the phone, that he was No. 26 on a waiting list for a bed.

However, officials at both Minnesota hospitals said that their acute psychiatric care units do not have waiting lists. They also said that under VA policy, local police would be contacted to check on any veteran who talks about suicide over the phone.

A separate mental-health unit with beds at the St. Cloud veterans hospital had a waiting list of 21 veterans on Jan. 29, the VA's Vincent said. That unit, known as residential treatment, is more for ongoing cases involving mental health and substance abuse, not for acute psychiatric care, she said.

Seeing a plea for help

The records from St. Cloud show that in one instance, Schulze told the counselor questioning him over the phone that he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder at Camp Pendleton, Calif., when he was still in the Marines. "My life has been falling apart since I returned from Iraq," Schulze said in the record.

He also was taking medication for "excruciating pain every day," which he said resulted from carrying heavy military gear that included, his father said, a 120-pound machine gun. Under "personal strengths," Schulze replied: "Big heart."

Jim and Marianne Schulze said the mental health records from the Minneapolis veterans hospital show a disturbing plea for help that suggest suicidal inclinations.

In one record from a visit on Feb. 16, 2006, Schulze "stated that something will set him off (e.g., seeing a person of Middle Eastern descent) and he will start shaking and feel extremely upset. On a daily basis, his temper will lead him to punch windows and holes in walls. ... The veteran further reported that several times per day he will experience uncontrollable episodes of extreme anxiety that are triggered by military reminders."

Schulze told counselors that he heard "intrusive military-related sounds" such as Middle East religious ceremonies and saw combat images in flashbacks.

The two investigators in the Schulze case came from the VA's Office of the Medical Inspector, which Burns said is an independent, objective organization that Congress established to monitor veteran care.

He said the inspectors would be talking with the Schulze family, although Jim Schulze said Friday he hadn't heard from them.

Burns said the findings will be shared with members of Congress who have oversight responsibilities for the VA, as well as directors of the Minneapolis and St. Cloud hospitals.

Jim Schulze, who served three tours of duty in Vietnam, said he's pressing the VA for answers in his son's death to help other veterans who might be in the same situation.

"The physical wounds will heal the best they can," he said of returning veterans from Iraq. "The psychological wounds never will."

Kevin Giles • 612-673-7707 • kgiles@startribune.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Family disputes VA following suicide of vet

The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Feb 5, 2007 16:36:15 EST

MINNEAPOLIS — The family of an Iraq war veteran who killed himself is disputing Veterans Affairs records that indicate he failed to tell hospital officials he was thinking of suicide.

Former Marine Jonathan Schulze’s father and stepmother, Jim and Marianne Schulze, said they heard their 25-year-old son tell staff members at a VA hospital that he was suicidal. He killed himself Jan. 16.

“The most disturbing part for me is their denial of Jon’s suicidal condition,” said Jim Schulze, who has read nearly 400 pages of records, mostly from counseling his son received at the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center in St. Cloud after he returned from Iraq in 2004.

Veterans Affairs officials in Minnesota wouldn’t comment on the records or on any dealings with Jonathan Schulze, said Joan Vincent, the VA’s public affairs officer in St. Cloud.

“We need to maintain the privacy of this veteran,” she said Friday.

The case is under investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Matt Burns, an agency spokesman in Washington, said the findings will be shared with Congress. The probe was requested by Sen. Daniel Akaka, a Hawaii Democrat and chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

The records obtained by the Schulzes include two conversations Jonathan Schulze had with staff at the St. Cloud hospital. A Jan. 11 document shows Schulze came to St. Cloud to ask for screening for chemical dependency treatment and was referred to a clinical social worker.

The Schulzes said the records don’t mention that Jonathan Schulze told a staff member he was suicidal and asked to be admitted even though a document from Jan. 12 indicated Jonathan spoke with a counselor over the phone and was asked about suicide.

Under the category, “Having/had suicidal ideation/attempts,” the counselor wrote: “no/no.” Ideation is a clinical term referring to thoughts or inclinations.

Marianne Schulze said she heard Jonathan tell the counselor he felt suicidal. She said Jonathan hung up the phone and told her that he was No. 26 on a waiting list.

However, officials at both Minnesota hospitals said their acute psychiatric care units do not have waiting lists. In addition, VA policy says local police would be contacted to check on any veteran who talks about suicide.

A separate mental-health unit with beds at the St. Cloud veterans hospital had a waiting list of 21 veterans on Jan. 29, the Vincents said. That unit, known as residential treatment, is more for ongoing cases, not for acute care.

The records from St. Cloud show that Schulze told the counselor questioning him over the phone that he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“My life has been falling apart since I returned from Iraq,” Schulze said in the record.

Jonathan Schulze told counselors he heard “intrusive military-related sounds” and had flashbacks of combat images.

Jim Schulze, who served in Vietnam, said he wanted to help other veterans and shared the records with the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

“The physical wounds will heal the best they can,” he said. “The psychological wounds never will.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Family of Iraq war vet who killed himself dispute VA records indicating no mention of suicide

By: Associated Pres -

MINNEAPOLIS -- The family of an Iraq war veteran who killed himself is disputing Veterans Affairs records that indicate he failed to tell hospital officials he was thinking of suicide.

Jonathan Schulze's father and stepmother, Jim and Marianne Schulze, said they heard their 25-year-old son tell staff members at a VA hospital that he was suicidal. He killed himself Jan. 16.

"The most disturbing part for me is their denial of Jon's suicidal condition," said Jim Schulze, who has read nearly 400 pages of records, mostly from counseling his son received at the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center in St. Cloud after he returned from Iraq in 2004.

Veterans Affairs officials in Minnesota wouldn't comment on the records or on any dealings with Jonathan Schulze, said Joan Vincent, the VA's public affairs officer in St. Cloud.

"We need to maintain the privacy of this veteran," she said Friday.

The case is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Matt Burns, an agency spokesman in Washington, said the findings will be shared with Congress. The probe was requested by Sen. Daniel Akaka, a Hawaii Democrat and chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

The records obtained by the Schulzes include two conversations Jonathan Schulze had with staff at the St. Cloud hospital. A Jan. 11 document shows Schulze came to St. Cloud to ask for screening for chemical dependency treatment and was referred to a clinical social worker.

The Schulzes said the records don't mention that Jonathan Schulze told a staff member he was suicidal and asked to be admitted even though a document from Jan. 12 indicated Jonathan spoke with a counselor over the phone and was asked about suicide.

Under the category, "Having/had suicidal ideation/attempts," the counselor wrote: "no/no." Ideation is a clinical term referring to thoughts or inclinations.

Marianne Schulze said she heard Jonathan tell the counselor he felt suicidal. She said Jonathan hung up the phone and told her that he was No. 26 on a waiting list.

However, officials at both Minnesota hospitals said their acute psychiatric care units do not have waiting lists. In addition, VA policy says local police would be contacted to check on any veteran who talks about suicide.

A separate mental-health unit with beds at the St. Cloud veterans hospital had a waiting list of 21 veterans on Jan. 29, the Vincents said. That unit, known as residential treatment, is more for ongoing cases, not for acute care.

The records from St. Cloud show that Schulze told the counselor questioning him over the phone that he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"My life has been falling apart since I returned from Iraq," Schulze said in the record.

Jonathan Schulze told counselors he heard "intrusive military-related sounds" and had flashbacks of combat images.

Jim Schulze, who served in Vietnam, said he wanted to help other veterans and shared the records with the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

"The physical wounds will heal the best they can," he said. "The psychological wounds never will."

[thedrifter]

‘A delayed casualty’

After seeking help, combat vet sought solace in suicide
By Kevin Giles - Minneapolis Star Tribune
Posted : February 12, 2007

At first, Jonathan Schulze tried to live with the nightmares and the grief he brought home from Iraq. He was a tough kid from central Minnesota, and more than that, a Marine to the core.

Yet his moods when he returned home told another story. He sobbed on his parents’ couch as he told them how fellow Marines had died, and how he, a machine gunner, had killed the enemy. In his sleep, he screamed the names of dead comrades. He had visited a psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis.

Two weeks ago, Schulze went to the VA hospital in St. Cloud, Minn. He told a staff member he was thinking of killing himself, and asked to be admitted to the mental health unit, said his father and stepmother, who accompanied him. They said he was told he couldn’t be admitted that day. The next day, as he spoke to a counselor in St. Cloud by phone, he was told he was No. 26 on the waiting list, his parents said.

Four days later, Schulze, 25, committed suicide in his New Prague home.

Citing privacy laws, Veterans Affairs officials wouldn’t comment specifically on the case, nor would they confirm or deny the Schulze family’s account. However, Dr. Sherrie Herendeen, line director for mental health services at the St. Cloud hospital, said Jan. 25 that under VA policy, a veteran talking about suicide would immediately be escorted into the hospital’s locked mental health unit for treatment.

She also said that after hearing of Schulze’s death, the hospital is doing an internal review of its procedures.

Schulze’s father and stepmother, Jim and Marianne Schulze of rural Stewart, Minn., say their son would be alive today if the VA had acted on his pleas for admittance. They say they heard him tell VA staff in St. Cloud that he felt suicidal — in person Jan. 11 at the hospital, and over the phone Jan. 12.

On the evening of Jan. 16, Schulze called family and friends to tell them that he was preparing to kill himself. They called New Prague police, who smashed in the door and found him hanging from an electrical cord. Police attempted to resuscitate him, but it was too late.

Schulze’s family doctor in Stewart, a farming crossroads in McLeod County, said he was convinced that Schulze suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, a disabling mental condition that can result from military combat.

“Jonathan was a classic,” said Dr. William Phillips, who said he first examined Schulze in October 2004 when Schulze was home on leave from Marine duty.

Phillips said Schulze was reliving combat in his sleep, had flashbacks when he was awake, couldn’t eat, felt paranoid, struggled with relationships and admitted to drinking alcohol excessively. Phillips prescribed medication to calm his nerves and help him sleep.

The doctor also asked Schulze to seek counseling at Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base in California where he was assigned. Phillips said he was unable to learn whether Schulze had done so.

“We don’t have a system for this,” Phillips said the week ending Feb. 2. “The VA is overwhelmed, and we’re rural doctors out here trying to deal with this. Unfortunately, we’re going to see a lot of Jonathans.”

Seeking help

Army Maj. Cynthia Rasmussen, the combat stress officer for the 88th Regional Readiness Command at Fort Snelling, said veterans returning to Minnesota who have problems often don’t seek help until their civilian lives begin to fall apart.

“Soldiers think if they go to get help that they’re going to be seen as weak, but they also think their command won’t have faith in them,” she said.

Rasmussen said reasons for mental illness among returning veterans are many and complex, but often relate to personality changes that service members must make while in uniform — and especially in combat zones — and then try to readjust to civilian life.

Schulze’s family said he left the Corps in late 2005. An official with Marine Corps Mobilization Command said he was a private in the Individual Ready Reserve.

But even after leaving service, he continued to have aching memories of combat.

“When he got back from Iraq, he was mentally scattered,” said his older brother Travis, who also served there with the Marines.

Much of Jonathan Schulze’s anguish seemed to relate to combat in Ramadi in April 2004. Schulze, who carried a heavy machine gun, wrote his parents that 16 Marines, many of them close friends, had died in two afternoons of firefights and bombings. Twice he was wounded but didn’t tell his parents, not wanting them to worry. He wrote them about dismembered bodies. About youth and combat and disillusionment. And about the bombs.

“I pray so much over here and ask God to keep me out of harm’s way and to make it back home alive and in one piece,” he wrote Jim and Marianne in May 2004. “I bet I easily pray over a dozen times a day and I always pray while I am on patrol as I am terrified of getting hit by an IED aka a bomb. Our vehicle elements and Marines on patrols are getting hit hard by these bombs the Iraqis plant all over and hide on the ground.”

Schulze carried guilt that fellow Marines died. He wanted to return to Iraq to somehow redeem himself, said his father, who did three tours of duty in Vietnam.

Because of that, his son at first resisted counseling, Jim Schulze said: “Being a Marine, he was too proud to get help. They want to make you impervious of any emotion. And when you get out, it’s almost impossible to put it back the way it was.”

When Schulze left the Marine Corps, he participated in military color guards, visited aging veterans in the state homes, helped anyone in need. He worked with his stepfather building houses. An unmarried father, Schulze bragged of adoration for his young daughter, Kaley Marie, on his MySpace Web site.

But the war always got in the way of a normal life.

Schulze was on an emotional roller coaster and couldn’t get off, said his close Marine friend from Iraq, Eric Satersmoen, who with Schulze’s stepbrothers described him as becoming uncharacteristically quiet.

“Lot of inner turmoil, lot of flashbacks, lot of nightmares,” was how Jim Schulze described his son.

The Jan. 11 visit to the VA in St. Cloud came a few weeks after Jonathan Schulze waited for more than three hours at the VA hospital in Minneapolis, hoping to be admitted, Jim Schulze said. His son last saw a psychiatrist at the Minneapolis VA on Dec. 14 but someone there told him he couldn’t be admitted for treatment until March, Jim Schulze said. They went to St. Cloud with the expectation that Jonathan could be admitted quicker.

Satersmoen and Travis Schulze think that Jonathan Schulze didn’t intend to kill himself. They said he was drunk and confused and speculate that he unintentionally blacked out before police arrived.

Secondary causes of death, said the Minnesota Regional Coroner’s Office in Hastings, were post-traumatic stress disorder and acute and chronic alcoholism.

At the funeral in Prior Lake, Schulze lay in his Marine dress blues, two Purple Hearts and his other medals pinned to his tunic. Dozens of young men — fellow Marines — gathered in groups to tell stories. They called him Jonny. He was funny, they said. The life of the party.

Cold wind ripped across the cemetery in Stewart where he was buried. Veterans from the Hutchinson, Minn., VFW fired a three-volley salute. Travis Schulze, dressed in black, and Satersmoen, wearing Marine dress blues, removed the flag from the casket and folded it. Travis Schulze presented the flag to his father. And saluted him.

“He was a delayed casualty of the Iraq war,” Jim Schulze said of Jonathan.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Editorial: One death is too many

Posted : February 12, 2007

Like thousands of America’s youngest generation of veterans, former Marine Jonathan Schulze came home from Iraq, hung up his uniform and tried to move on.

He could not. The bloody memories of the insurgents he killed and the buddies he lost haunted him.

Finally, with thoughts of suicide swirling in his head, he contacted the Veterans Affairs hospital in St. Cloud, Minn., in person and by phone, and asked to be admitted to the mental health unit.

But according to Schulze’s family, a VA counselor told him there was no room and placed him on a waiting list.

Four days later, at age 25, Jonathan Schulze hanged himself.

Under VA policy, a veteran talking of suicide is to be escorted into a locked mental health unit for treatment. It’s not clear what went wrong last month in St. Cloud, but what is clear is that the VA has consistently underestimated the mental health care crisis it faces as this war goes on.

Last year, the Democratic staff of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee surveyed VA Vet Center managers around the nation. Many said they are cutting back on various services — including one-on-one mental health counseling for combat vets — because demand was outstripping available resources.

VA officials in Washington flatly denied these assertions and also denied a finding that the number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeking mental health services had doubled just from October 2005 to June 2006.

Unfortunately, those statistics came straight from the VA’s own reports to Congress.

Writing to the VA, Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, said he’s concerned that reports of the failure to respond to Schulze’s cry for help “may indicate systemic problems in VA’s capacity to identify, monitor and treat veterans who are suicidal.”

He’s right to be concerned.

If even one veteran can fall as deeply into the cracks as Jonathan Schulze reportedly did, then the system has failed.

Ellie