In the U.S., it is estimated that 44 per cent of all homeless people are Vietnam veterans.
No, 44% of homeless are not Vietnam Vets, that's absurd on the face of it. I live in Santa Monica, "Home of the Homeless", and I can tell you that the vast majority of homeless are not old enough to have served in Vietnam (though plenty claim to have, though I guess enough have been busted on their accounts of being in Vietnam that they tend to update their tales of harrowing experiences that inexorably forced them to a life on the streets to the 1st Gulf War). The kind of PTSD inducing combat that might leave somebody forever scarred largely ended by 1973, and we were completely out of Vietnam by 1975, so unless you were born before 1955, it's impossible for you to have experienced combat in Vietnam. 44% of homeless people in the United States are not over the age of 54, and of those that are homeless and old enough to have served in Vietnam, nowhere near 100% of those folks did.
After some quick googling, I can't find any study that states such a high number, for current populations of homeless (again, 25 years ago, a number like that would seem plausible, but not now). Seems the last big federal government study about homelessness was done by HUD in 1996 (and updated in 1999), and even 13 years ago, homeless veterans constituted less than 25% of overall homeless, and in other studies from 13 years ago, even then Vietnam Vets were around 40% of the total of male homeless people (women veterans rarely end up homeless, interestingly), and in the intervening 13 years, I'm certain there's been attrition to that number (this table from HUD is of people using their services, but they speculate based on other surveys that there numbers are in line with the total figures)
If I threw out a statistic claiming that 20% of British Seamen suffered from rickets, I bet you could go back through the historical record and find a time when 20% of limey sailors suffered all sorts of wonderful diseases, but that's not the case now, and if I were using those old statistics to make a claim about the scope of a future problem, then I'd hope anyone reading would laugh off my ridiculous suggestion.
And as far as the gist of the article, I'm not understanding why it matters whether British Veterans get their free health care from the NHS or from the military. What difference does it make? Either way, the government is picking up the tab, and a psychiatrist is a psychiatrist, whether they work on a military base, or in an NHS run clinic. If anything, an NHS based service should be more convenient, and more easily accessible than if veterans could only seek care from military specialist.
This shouldn't be viewed as a problem at all, unless NHS doctors exhibit anti-military bias (which wouldn't be surprising), and the general service at NHS clinics was sub-standard (again, wouldn't be at all surprising).
Combat is traumatic, always has been, always will be, societies have differed in how to help combatants to recover from their experiences, and social mores have sent troops into conflicts with differing skill sets in how to process their experiences to begin with. It's inevitable that combat leaves a mark, it's not inevitable that it leads to an inability to reintergrate with society at large, and most veterans have found a way in which to carry on with their lives and function even with the memories of what they did and what they faced. We need to honor those that defend our freedoms, and give them all the help they need, but we shouldn't be so quick to lump all combat veterans into the 'ticking time bomb' stereotype that pervades Hollywood and the rest of media, cause history and experience shows that stereotype as being false and pernicious.
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