Berks veterans director working to treat the mental scars of war

Jay Ostrich has been to dark and desperate places, has known what it feels like to not want to go on.

And he has made it to the other side.

The director of the Berks County Department of Veterans Affairs is intimately familiar with the mental health challenges faced by the military men and women who have served their country. He has lived them, he has survived them.

Now, he wants to help others do the same. Ostrich is using his position leading the county’s veterans affairs department to offer free, effective mental health services those battling the invisible wounds of war.

A personal fight

When Ostrich enlisted in the Air Force, he did so out of a sense of duty. It was the day after the U.S. suffered the horrific terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a monumental event that left him feeling compelled to answer the call and help defend his country.

He knew there were risks, he knew he would be putting his body and his life on the line. But he didn’t realize the threat his mind would face.

Ostrich served in the Air Force and Pennsylvania Air National Guard for more than two decades. He saw combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking part in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

In 2010 and 2011, he was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The site was a major target for insurgents and terrorists.

“We took a lot of indirect fire,” he said. “Mortars, rockets, sniper fire — we saw a lot of incoming.”

Ostrich said he always had to be alert, always had to be on guard. The threat was constant and dire, and his mind constantly had to be prepared to react.

When he returned home to Cornwall, Lebanon County, where he was living at the time, Ostrich found it difficult to flip the mental switch back to civilian life.

“You realize that any time you deploy in a combat zone, one of the best moments is when you get to come home to your family,” he said. “But you bring that war back with you.”

For Ostrich, that meant an oversensitivity to loud noises and sudden movements. It meant a constant feeling of danger, of needing to be ready to react to a threat.

“I had the startle reflexes of a newborn baby,” he said.

Ostrich was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety and needed help. Unfortunately, when he turned to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the answer he received was medication.

He was subscribed benzodiazepines, often called benzos, a drug that slows down communication between the brain and the body. They left him foggy and numb without addressing the underlying problem.

They also left him severely addicted.

Ostrich said trying to get off the benzos was in many ways worse than the mental health challenges they were meant to treat. It led to dozens of trips to the emergency room and, at his lowest points, thoughts of suicide.

Hope finally arrived in the form of Stellate Ganglion Block treatment, which involves an injection of anesthetic medication into a cluster of nerves in the neck.

Ostrich said the treatment has worked wonders for him, helping him manage his PTSD and anxiety and leaving him free of the suicidal thoughts that haunted him for years.

The VA does administer the treatment — calling it safe, effective and ethical — but currently only provides it at 11 of its 1,363 medical centers and outpatient clinics. That leaves many veterans seeking it left to rely on the expensive private market, Ostrich said.

Ostrich said his own experience has made it clear to him that more needs to be done, that veterans need more support and more options when it comes to their mental health.

“When I took this job, mental health was the number one thing for me,” he said. “I saw my brothers and sisters suffering in silence, and it doesn’t need to be that way.”

An urgent issue

The numbers are staggering.

Berks is home to around 20,000 veterans. And those veterans are about 4 1/2 times more likely to take their own lives than the rest of the population, Ostrich said.

And it’s not just a local issue. Ostrich said that across the U.S. more than 20 veterans die by suicide each day.

“We’re tired of the numbers,” Ostrich said. “We can’t continue to take it, to continue to take fire.

“I’ve seen my brothers and sisters suffer in silence — suicide, substance abuse, employment problems, family problems. And it doesn’t have to be that way.”

For many military members, returning home from their service represents a complete change to their way of life.

“Most people don’t understand, most people don’t understand the way we live,” said Cindy Quinter, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Berks County and a military spouse. “We create our own little families.”

Cindy Quinter, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Berks County and a military spouse. (Courtesy of NAMI)

Returning home often means leaving those families behind. And that can create difficulties in unpacking the stressful and often traumatic experiences they face while serving.

“So many come home with so much baggage,” Quinter said.

That includes her husband.

Quinter said her husband served in the Vietnam War. When he returned, he was different.

“He beat me in my sleep,” she said. “When he woke up the next morning, he had no idea he had done it. Apparently I had touched him while he was sleeping and he just reacted.”

Quinter suffered silently for quite sometime, unaware that other military spouses were facing the same type of things.

“Nobody was talking about it,” she said.

Ostrich said that is too often the case. Members of the military, once poised to act and react at a moment’s notice, are suddenly left paralyzed.

“In combat, when you’re receiving fire, you react without thinking,” he said. “When they come home they don’t move out, they don’t ask for help.”

Ostrich said paralysis is often due to the stigma that still surrounds mental illness, the fear of letting others know you’re struggling and a lack of knowledge of where help can be found.

He’s working to change that.

Here to help

“We’re in a unique position to help,” Ostrich said of the veterans department. “We have a total of 138 years of military experience in this office.”

Ostrich has made it a goal to address mental health issues among local veterans. That means trying to provide as many different options for help as possible through a single access point — the veterans department.

And it means providing those options for free.

“We have so many resources in the county, but sometimes organizations don’t talk to each other,” he said. “And that can make it hard for people to find the help they need. We want people to know there is trauma assistance right here in their backyard.”

In June, the veterans department became the first in the state to partner with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to offer free on-site mental health treatment. A licensed therapist is scheduling appointments at the Etchberger Berks County Veterans Service Center in Spring Township.

“We can jump right into the trauma and help them unpack what happened to them,” he said. “It’s not about what’s wrong with them, but about what happened to them.”

The veterans center is also offering other forms of mental health treatment.

Mette Gleason, a certified nature and forest therapy guide, has begun offering nature connection walks for veterans.

Mette Gleason, a certified nature and forest therapy guide, has begun offering nature connection walks for veterans at locations such as the Angora Fruit Farm in Alsace Township. (BILL UHRICH/READING EAGLE)

The wellness practice, which was developed in Japan in the 1980s, aims to provide healing through a deepened connection with nature.

“It’s about slowing down enough to notice things we’re often too busy to notice,” she said. “It’s about calming and healing.”

Gleason said the therapy has proved to be effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

Monthly sessions started in August at Angora Fruit Farm in Lower Alsace Township, but the skills learned during them can be used anywhere that is conducive to immersing oneself in nature, Gleason said.

“It’s about listening to the birds, the wind in the trees,” she said. “It’s about watching bees collect pollen.”

Gleason said she helps those seeking treatment open up their senses, teaching methods of relaxation and observation.

“I basically help patients open up in a sensory way and then send them out into nature,” she said. “Nature doesn’t judge us, and we’re going to get out of it what we put into it.”

Ostrich said he can relate to the idea of reconnecting with one’s senses.

“When I finally started getting the treatment that I needed, I started hearing the birds sing outside, I was able to hear my daughter laughing and playing,” he said. “Vividness and texture came back, I went from everything being black and gray to the world being colorful again. It’s so important to get that sense of connection.”

The veterans department is also offering two treatment options through NAMI of Berks County.

One is a support group for family members of military members battling mental illness.

Quinter said the group is a place where family members can talk about their experiences and share insight, something that was missing when she was dealing with her husband’s mental illness.

“This is a place where we can help explain, ‘This is not our husband, this is his disease,’” she said. “This will help them understand what their loved one is going through.”

The other NAMI effort is a veterans connections recovery support group.

It is designed to connect, encourage and support participants using a structured group therapy model. It is led by a facilitator specifically trained to work with veterans and who is also living in mental illness recovery.

Both support groups began in July and are held twice a month.

NAMI is also looking to introduce educational classes for veterans aimed at providing the tools needed to live a life in recovery.

Ostrich said he’s thrilled to be offering a variety of mental health services for veterans that give them a way to address their struggles.

“For so many of us, we’ve been mired in grief, anger and frustration regarding the veterans suicide epidemic,” he said. “As military members, we want to know we have the ability to fight back. We want the ability to bring healing and the ability to end suffering.”

And that’s why Ostrich said he’s not satisfied with what has been put in place so far. He plans to keep adding services, reaching out to any and every organization that can lend a hand.

“We need to build a coalition of options for veterans,” he said. “One size doesn’t fit all, we all boil at different temperatures. Right now status quo is not an option, failure is not an option.”

All of the mental health service offered through the veterans department are free and confidential. For more information visit www.berkspa.gov/departments/veterans-affairs or call 610-378-5601.