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Bruce Parkman on Veteran Suicide, Brain Injury and the Fight for Better Treatment | Broken Brains · Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hey folks, Bruce Parkman here from Broken Brains, the official podcast of the Matt Parkman Foundation, where um sometimes I can be, you know, a very emotional person when it comes down to the s the issues that we discuss on this podcast.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I'm just downright pissed, you know, and I got a little mad this morning when I started, you know, thinking uh about some of the when we start talking about veterans right now, and we'll I'll talk about kids on another section.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: But what does it say about us as a society when a hundred and thirty thousand or a hundred and sixty thousand men and women kill themselves and we're not pissed?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about that.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: What does that say?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I just got done with a podcast where I talked to a young man who, you know, has served a lot in Afghanistan, and and he said, Well, my first friend that killed himself.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, who are you in your 40s to already have more than one person that killed himself?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: How many veterans do we talk to that say, Well, I just lost another friend?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And this happens over and over and over again.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what have what has our leadership done about it?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Military leaders, you know, our generals, you know, our our political leaders, especially, who have the power to to to enact on this.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And much like school shootings, which is something that we really haven't done too much about, we are being told that this is acceptable.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: That it's okay for veterans to kill themselves.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, I found out that it was the the issue of repetitive blast exposure and repetitive impacts was brought up to Congress to be covered by the PACT Act, which is for the first time an act that can that allows for presumptive coverage.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you were close to a burn pit, okay, you probably got some crap.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: I and during the invasion, I was around some pretty nasty stuff, but yeah, I was a contractor.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really care.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I saw it and I smelt it.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we had dysentery.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: We lost, we were like in combat ineffective because somebody who wasn't used to latrines.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like I dug a lot of latrines back in the day and other places, they put them too close to the mess hall.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So guess what?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Guess where the flies went.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we had an entire uh brigade of people almost like anybody could have kicked our ass.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: But these are the lessons learned that we need to get to come back from because it is not acceptable that these conditions could be covered under the PACT Act.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what they said when they were presented with this information?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: They said, you're right.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Repetitive blast exposure, oh my God, what a sorrow.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that you are right.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: That is that that is an issue that we're not going to cover it.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know why?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: The cost.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: How much is a veteran's life worth?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: That would be my next question to these people.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how much is that life?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And not just the veteran life, any life.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: What's the price on that when you can save it?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Then it's different when you have a disease that's uncurable, like COVID got it was, right?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you know, I'm not even getting into that conversation.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, you know, it was like, hey, you know, uh, we got this incurable disease, and unfortunately, people die.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's unfortunate, that's tragic.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've got that.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: But when there are cures, when there is hope, and we deny that, that is a crime.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: That is a crime.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that is just so morally bankrupt that I can't even say that.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: In a country that spends so much money on dumb shit, I mean, look at the papers on what we spend money on.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we can't support, like, and I don't even know what the cost would be.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you this.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: That compared to what we offer veterans now, which is a lifetime, and let me say that lifetime, spell it out for you.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: L-I-F-E-T-I-M-E.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, psychological intervention, I mean, I mean psychiatric medications and therapy, which after 25 years has produced the same protocols, have produced 100,000, 20, 30,000, 60,000 veterans that are dead.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's what is produced.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Has it saved lives?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: There is a place for medicine, there is a place for therapy.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Does it help with mental illness when it comes to brain injury?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: That has been proven.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the outcome.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Part of it.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we, and you look at we, the fact that the VA, I don't, I think the last number is$700 billion a year is spent on veteran suicide programs that aren't working.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yet we can't cover this under the PACT Act.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: When we know that these modalities cost pennies on a dollar over the lifetime, than what is currently being given to our veterans that on the back end has caused all these deaths.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: These medicines are not sick.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: These medicines have a purpose.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: They also come with side effects, blackboard warnings.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And none of our veterans, up until recently, I think we just got a bill in Florida that's going to say, hey, man, if you take this stuff, your hair falls out or your peepee doesn't work, or whatever it is.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Veterans need to be known that they're taking these medicines, not just one.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Our VA right now is a pillbox.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: It is a show-up.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know, when you go into the vending machines in the men's room, you can buy whatever you want, your sex toys, whatever.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, pills.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: You don't even have to put in a quarter.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just show up, and we're going to give you all the drugs you want until you die, or until your wife leaves you, or until you lose hope.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I am sick of veterans being told that their new normal is to live with a brain injury that's curable.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: I just, I, uh, I refuse to accept this when I know different and you know different, and everybody else knows.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: But we can't spend the money not only on the treatments, which would cost a tenth of what we're going to spend.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, gosh, the money that we would put back in our pockets, and not only the money, the veterans' lives that could be repaired, the veterans' families that can recover.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, they need to expand this coverage to the caregivers, the poor wives and the children, or the husbands and the children that have been putting up with crazy mom and dad who got hurt in the war, but that's their new normal.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: So not only you and you and your family are now going to live like this for the rest of your life, and that's okay.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Just deal with it.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that is unacceptable.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not when help is there.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: For us to deny that our veterans that are, you know, not, they don't even know why they're crazy most of the time, because we're not even training our people in the correlation between, you know, regret of the blast exposure and damaged brains and mental illness, like, you know, and then all the other problems that go with that.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're not even close to letting our population know that this exists.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now the active duty military's, you know, doing good.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're doing better and they're actually moving, which is good.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: But how many veterans are out there and how many veterans need coverage?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they need to know that there's hope.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we are denying them that.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that is wrong.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, from my perspective, I want to know where's the outrage?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it okay to continuously cite hundreds of thousands of, you know, over a hundred thousand dead vet dead veterans?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that just cool?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what where is the outrage, the effort, the change, the movement, despite billions of dollars that are being spent, none of the modalities, more or less, that we're talked about on this show are available, yet they all exist.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has come up with a scalable model saying we need to offer these treatments to our veterans because the current status of kids dying is unacceptable.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have to admit that pharmaceuticals and therapy is just not working.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: So why can't we admit that?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: What is so wrong by saying I made a mistake?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't know.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we didn't know.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we all know that how cool it is to jump out of planes and if you hit your head and blow things up and shoot big guns until your arms tingle.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Dude, that is cool.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: I got it.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: We all got it, we all did it.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: But now we've overdone it, and now we know.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And ever since we known, all we want to do is goddamn study, and pardon my pardon me, Ward, is study it.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: All this research.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Let's have some more research.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's have all these conferences with all these fancy doctors and all their big fancy cars and these big fancy buildings.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've been to them, all right?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I see the same thing being studied over and over and over again.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: What's not being studied?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: How effective is ketamine?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: How effective is ibogin?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: How effective is this?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: How effective is all this other stuff that we know thousands of veterans have paid out of money, pad out of pocket, or foundations have paid out of pocket for them to go.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And over and over and over again, I talk to practitioners of these specialties, and the positive impact rate is over 80% across the board.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: TMS MERT, Ibogaine, ayahuasca, whatever.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Ketamine.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some studies have a little bit lower than when it's been studied.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: In my study, when I talk to people that do it, to people that have done it, those are my numbers.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I just don't understand why those numbers cannot drive the change that we need when kids are not here.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand this.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Why is this acceptable?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it just doesn't make any sense to me that this status quo is allowed to continue and we're gonna do something about it.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what yet.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what I got to do to go to jail, get in the paper.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I wrote legislation.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know, it didn't go anywhere.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I had a goddamn congressman promise me, a serviceman, that he was gonna do something with my legislation.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't do a damn thing.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Baby seal.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: They do not.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: It just sat there.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: This legislation.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody said it was good legislation.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now we go to the PACT Act and we get said, and they and these people that brought it there, like they got told, oh, yeah, we got a problem, man.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not our problem.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna set, we're not gonna do anything about that.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Where is that outrage?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Why cannot we get together as a nonprofit community, as a veteran community, and get up there and say, this is unacceptable.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Here is a plan.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote the plan.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's the legislation.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's find these kids and assess them.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's diagnose them with mental, with brain scans, cognitrial, whatever it is, and show that they have a brain injury.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then let's make all these treatments available and pay for them through insurance, through the PAC.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's the plan.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it is so simple to put in place.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be a little bit hard to scale because a lot of these modalities are just not there yet.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: As us veterans die off and these new kids that are in there right now and they're shooting silenced weapons, they come up, all this, all these costs go away.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: These are not forever costs.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: But we have to take care of the men and women that have served this country.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Have to.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: We wrote that check, not them.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: They did their job.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: They signed that line, you know, dedicating their life to this country, put themselves, we put them, in the most horrible places in wars that didn't make a goddamn bit of sense.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Pardon my French Lord, once again.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And they're gone.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: We lost a lot of kids.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: 10,000, right?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Unacceptable to me.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now we've lost another 15 times that.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever the estimates are, it's too much.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have to address this and we have to get it fixed.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because it has to go away.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what I wanted to talk about today.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to get something off my chest.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's been bothering me the more as I as I had to take a break because of another company that I work, I run.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And um I'm just starting getting back to this.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just like, where is where why?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why doesn't this move?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's gonna move.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we need you to help us figure it out.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we, you know, so we're gonna do this.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget, two weeks, third summit on international, uh Detird International Summit on repetitive brain trauma right here in Tampa.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is what we're talking about.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'll talk about children later.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to take care of our vets.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they like I said, they're they're paying a price.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: They did a sign up for this, man.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: They signed up to fight for this company and they did that.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now we need to fight for them so they're taken care of.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what it's all about.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Till the next episode on Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman, the official podcast of the Mac Parkman Foundation, I thank you so much for the time and attention you pity spend on this show.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: It means so much to us that you keep coming back, you provide us questions, you provide us comments, and we keep trying to make the show better.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Please provide input.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let us know where you need to go.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: You like what you hear, you know, you know, liked us on Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, wherever you find it.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget, the only book in the world that can talk to you as a parent about the risks of playing contact sports with a developing brain is for free.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's on our website, the Mac Parkman Foundation website.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Go get that book.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: I just updated it.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't do all that work for nothing.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: So till the next time on Broken Brains, remember your children, they only got one melon.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: It bruises easy, man.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Take care of that thing.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's who they are.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll see you next time on Broken Brains.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: God bless you all.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.