Veteran's Peace of Mind Project

The Veterans Peace of Mind Project is dedicated to cultivating the fundamental sanity and dignity in individuals and in society at large. We help heal, strengthen, and empower individuals so that they can benefit themselves and others. Through generosity, we can foster environments that encourage humanity, dignity, compassion, and wisdom.

Testimonials

Why This Congressman Is Fighting To Bring Mindfulness To Veterans
Posted: 03/13/2014 12:31 pm EDT Updated: 03/13/2014 12:59 pm EDT

Wisconsin native Travis Leanna was 22 years old in 2007, when he was deployed to Fallujah for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Initially buzzing with excitement over the prospect of heading overseas and into combat, the young Marine quickly realized that the experience would be nothing like what he expected. Leanna spent most of his time in Fallujah hiding in various locations, working with improvised explosive devices, and looking for civilians who were making bombs.
"I got there and I got really scared -- not scared in the sense of being frightened, but scared of the power of being there and the decisions that can save or end people's lives," Leanna told The Huffington Post. "That's a lot for someone who's in their 20s."
When he returned to Wisconsin two years later, Leanna struggled with insomnia, and says he was "completely emotionally withdrawn from everyone."
"I would wake up startled because I'd think I fell asleep on post and something could be going on," Leanna said. "It was like waking up in combat."
Leanna says he was reluctant to seek help, or even admit that anything was wrong. But after he took part in a paid study of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he began practicing meditation. The experience completely changed his life, he says, and brought him the peace of mind that had eluded him since he went into combat years before. Now, Leanna teaches mindfulness and deep breathing to other veterans as part of Project Welcome Home Troops.
Leanna is one of an increasing number of veterans turning to mindfulness to cope with combat-related PTSD, and if Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) has anything to say about it, mindfulness will be offered as a treatment option to every U.S. veteran.
In November, Ryan and Rep. Rich Nugent (R-Fla.) introduced the Veterans and Armed Forces' Health Promotion Act of 2013, a bill aiming to improve the quality of health care provided to former members of the armed services by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense. The bill seeks to improve health and wellness among the veteran population through integrative health programs, including mindfulness-based programs, healthy eating plans and yoga therapy, as well as the creation of about 10 veteran family wellness centers across the country. It would also expand holistic care education and research for such common post-war issues as PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
Among the veteran population, mental health issues have reached a recent, and troubling, high. According to a recent Institute of Medicine report, the number of active-duty service members diagnosed with a psychological condition has increased by over 60 percent between 2001 and 2011, and an estimated 22 veterans commit suicide each day. PTSD -- an anxiety that develops after exposure to traumatic events -- afflicts roughly 11 to 20 percent of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and up to 30 percent of Vietnam veterans.
As these numbers continue to grow, critics say the government is not offering veterans enough mental health resources. CNN has called the lack of attention given to veterans' mental health issues the "greatest risk to returning service members."
"The default position is that we can treat this with medication, and I'm not saying that medication doesn't have a role to play here, but to have these vets on 10 or 12 or 15 prescriptions is insane," Ryan told HuffPost. "It just doesn't make any sense to anybody ... The other issue is that we really need to look at, study and evaluate these integrative health approaches."
"This bill is to try to address those issues in a different way, and with approaches that are working in different places across the country in the field of integrative health, and to use these approaches to try to help heal our veterans from some of these very difficult traumas that they have," Ryan said.
Ryan and his staff are currently working with members of the Veterans' Affairs Committee to get the bill on their radar. Ryan says they're also aggressively campaigning to get co-sponsors in Congress, which he believes will save money for the health care system in the long run, since most mindfulness and integrative health interventions are relatively inexpensive. What's more, they've been scientifically proven to be effective complementary treatments for a number of mental health issues...