If you provide an assessment from your treating physician or mental health professional that you are competent to handle your own affairs, that process will pretty much come to a halt.
Similarly, if you request a hearing and you show up with either an advocate from one of the vets groups or an attorney and argue your case, the VA has no cause and no incentive to move forward.
This is no different from the county dept. of social services requesting a guardianship if they believe that someone is siphoning money away from a beneficiary who is unable to handle his own affairs. If you show up at the hearing with your balanced checkbook, the judge will give the social worker a chewing out and send you home. If you miss the hearing because the voices in your head told you not to go, well then maybe you do need some help.
The only reason this is getting any traction is because the form letter mentions the guns and thereby plays into the agenda of a powerful industrial interest.
I have worked with veterans, and some of them need a lot of help. This letter is part of the process that gets them that help. If the letter didn't mention the magic word 'guns', none of the groups that is currently driving this campaign would give a ####.
The organization that brought this to my attention is this one:
Battling Bare: Military Wives Stripping Down to Battle PTSD - ABC News (via their Facebook page).
They have, over the past few months, shared tons of information about the current state of treatment or lack there-of for our soldiers returning home.
If playing to a gun lobby gets attention focused on needs of our returning service members that aren't being met, then I say go for it with gusto. You have to use what you can when it comes to "politics" and these days, unfortunately, PTSD is now a political issue.
Personally, I think that any country that is willing to throw its soldiers into combat (especially in a foreign country), damn well ought to be able to step up and see that they get what they need when they come home.
Perhaps we need some graphic pictures and videos of exactly what things are like over there shared in Congress and on the media -- a picture is worth a thousand words. If we have folks who can't sleep due to the pictures in their heads, then by-God, the folks who sent them there to see those images in person ought to be able to stomach those images, too!
We need something!! We are losing too many of our soldiers to non-combat. (And it's bad enough that we're losing them to combat, we don't need to add to the carnage with something that can be prevented or treated.)
