Veterans services and mental health

Jeff Raymond, Staff Writer

Published: May 25, 2008

It took depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and more than a decade of therapy for Cheryl Dubuc to be able to talk about being raped while serving her country.

“My way of dealing with it was shoving it down and not dealing with it,” she said. “I got to the point where I could do nothing for myself.”

The Norman resident was stationed at Alaska’s Elmendorf Air Force Base in 1977 when a fellow airman raped her. She said he was sentenced to “multiple life sentences” in federal prison, but only after he had beaten two women almost to death.

Dubuc served in the Air Force from 1973-83. She began coming to the Oklahoma City VA Medical Center a decade later, after failing to find help outside the veterans health care system.

“I was always spinning my wheels. They didn’t really know what to do with me,” said Dubuc, a retired speech-language pathologist on service-connected disability because of the rape. “At the VA, they have an understanding of what men and women go through in the service.”

The Oklahoman normally doesn’t publish the names of rape victims; however, Dubuc wished to speak out as part of her recovery and to show how the military has changed in how it deals with sexual assault.

For female service members, today’s VA is nothing like it used to be. By 2020, the agency predicts, women will make up 10 percent of veterans.

“I’ve been here 18 years, and we have a lot more women coming here than before,” said Dana Foley, Dubuc’s therapist at the Oklahoma City VA hospital.

In 1992, Foley said, the VA started to focus on military sexual trauma in the wake of the Navy’s Tailhook scandal.

“A lot of times the women’s needs were not as easily addressed or as directly addressed,” she said.

Foley said today’s female vets are younger and more active in their childbearing years than their predecessors. They’re exposed to more combat-related trauma. They need services to fit into work schedules and family life. They’re more likely to have a diagnosis of depression.

“When you’re first coming back from a war zone, your needs are different than when you’ve been back for 30 years,” Foley said.

In addition to personnel who track soldiers, sailors and airmen who return from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, VA hospitals have military sexual trauma and female-veteran coordinators. Community mental health centers have military sexual trauma counselors. The VA also is working to provide mental health services in all its clinics, Foley said.

At the Oklahoma City VA hosptial, mental health services include a post-traumatic stress disorder unit, an inpatient unit and outpatient clinic, a day treatment program, a substance abuse unit and a geriatric program.

Men also seek help for sexual trauma, Foley noted, calling the abuse “fairly common.” Things have changed, however. Women who have been through sexual trauma now have someone with whom they can confide without fear of punishment.

The opposite was true for Dubuc.

“They had no empathy whatsoever for me, for what I was going through. ... In a way, I feel like the military had really failed me,” she said.

At first, Dubuc denied she had been raped. She wants women who have experienced sexual trauma to know they have to take care of themselves.

“Pushing it down and not dealing with it is a very bad thing to do. It can eat you alive. It can make your life miserable,” she said.

Jeff Raymond: 475-3364, jraymond@oklahoman.com