By Don Sapatkin, The Philadelphia Inquirer |
That wasn't even the worst of it.
"I can remember, my mother and my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, they didn't know what to do," he said. It took five years and six more arrests before he began court-ordered treatment for the PTSD that he didn't know he had.
His homecoming might have been easier if he could have had access to a new website for
It has 200,000 pages of searchable local resources — legal clinics, housing, job openings specifically for veterans — and tens of thousands more about medical conditions, insurance, and veterans organizations. There are 30,000 pages on assistive devices alone. A diagram of a human lets you click on body parts to begin seeking information about what might be wrong. A keyword search for bills in
The site is the first local version of www.networkofcare.org for veterans in
They were built by
Even caseworkers would not otherwise have access to many of the links on the site, Bronzan said. Veterans don't know that many of the services are out there.
"How does somebody find things when they don't even know that they exist to look for?" Bronzan said.
Organizations that work with veterans sounded sold.
"This website is going to be huge for us in
Others said the site would fill in the gaps that exist between services for veterans. Some said they expected it to be particularly useful for
"Pride gets in the way" of simply walking into a VA hospital and saying you need help, said Wynn, the Iraq War veteran, who now works as a certified peer specialist for the city's behavioral health department.
A website is different.
"I can't stress how important this is," said Wynn, 35. "In the privacy of your own home, you'll say, 'Well, let me take a look.' "
215-854-2617 @DonSapatkin
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