By DaisyMae VanValkenburgh-Haftel, VETS Email Marketing Manager + HubSpot Administrator
When we speak about the sacrifices made by veterans, we often rely on the language of honor, courage, duty, and gratitude. These words recognize the seriousness of military service and the extraordinary demands placed upon those who serve. Yet gratitude, however sincere, is incomplete when it is not accompanied by a willingness to respond to the lasting consequences of that service.
For many veterans, the experience of coming home does not bring an immediate sense of safety or relief. The deployment may end, the uniform may be placed in a closet, and daily life may begin to resemble what it once was, but the body and mind do not always return as easily. Post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and other invisible wounds can follow veterans into their homes, relationships, careers, and communities.
These wounds rarely belong to the veteran alone. They are often felt by spouses who learn to recognize a change in breathing from across the room, children who sense when a parent is physically present but emotionally far away, and families who gradually reorganize their lives around symptoms they do not always understand. They are present in disrupted sleep, missed celebrations, strained marriages, lost employment, isolation, anger, grief, and the persistent feeling that the person who returned is still trying to find their way home.
A nation that asks people to place themselves in harm’s way assumes a responsibility that does not end when their service does. That responsibility includes ensuring that veterans have access to effective treatment for the injuries they carry because they answered that call.
Treatment is not charity. It is not an optional benefit that should depend upon luck, geography, income, or proximity to the right resources. Treatment is an act of justice.
The Responsibility That Follows Service
Military service is built on sacrifice, but it is also built on trust.
Service members trust that their training will prepare them for what they may encounter. They trust the people serving beside them, the leaders making decisions that shape their lives, and the country that sent them into conditions most civilians will never experience. That trust must continue after they return.
When veterans struggle with the psychological, emotional, and neurological consequences of service, they should not be expected to navigate those consequences alone. They should not have to spend years proving the severity of their suffering, moving through treatments that do not meet their needs, or accepting that a diminished quality of life is the inevitable price of having served.
Many veterans have followed every recommendation placed before them. They have tried medication, therapy, inpatient programs, support groups, and other forms of care. Some have found relief through these options, while others have continued to struggle despite years of effort. For those veterans, the failure of an existing treatment should never be treated as evidence that healing itself is impossible.
The limits of our current systems are not the limits of a person’s capacity to heal.
The Possibility of Another Path
Psychedelic-assisted therapies have become an important part of the conversation because they may offer another pathway for veterans who have not found sufficient relief through conventional approaches. These therapies should not be described as simple or miraculous solutions. Responsible treatment requires careful screening, preparation, professional support, and integration. It also requires the recognition that healing does not occur through a treatment alone.
What these therapies can offer is possibility, and possibility matters profoundly to someone who has been told, directly or indirectly, that they may have exhausted every available option.
Access Should Not Depend on Circumstance
The existence of a promising treatment does not mean that the people who need it can access it.
Veterans seeking psychedelic-assisted therapy may face significant financial, logistical, and emotional barriers. Treatment can require travel, time away from work, assistance with childcare, and support from a spouse or family member. The cost of care may extend beyond the treatment itself to include preparation, integration, medical evaluation, transportation, and continued support after that experience.
For a veteran already living with severe symptoms, these obstacles can become overwhelming. A person struggling to complete ordinary tasks may be expected to research complex treatment options, evaluate the quality and safety of providers, arrange travel, explain an unfamiliar therapy to their family, and find thousands of dollars to pay for care.
This is not a reasonable burden to place on someone who is already fighting for their life, their marriage, their sense of purpose, or their ability to remain connected to the world around them.
Access to treatment should not depend on whether a veteran has personal wealth, a flexible employer, a well-connected support system, or the energy to navigate a fragmented landscape of care.
It should reflect the seriousness of the injuries being treated and the responsibility we hold toward those whose service contributed to those injuries.
Justice asks us to look beyond whether care technically exists and consider whether it is truly reachable.
Healing Extends Beyond the Treatment Center
At VETS, we understand that treatment is rarely a single event. The path toward healing beings long before a veteran enters a treatment setting and continues long after they leave it.
Preparation can help veterans understand what they are seeking, consider the risks and possibilities of treatment, and enter the process with appropriate support. Integration can help them make sense of what emerged, translate insight into daily life, and remain grounded through the emotional and relational changes that may follow. Peer support, family education, community, and continued care can help transform an intense experience into something sustainable.
This wider understanding of treatment is important because the deepest signs of healing are often found in ordinary moments.
They may appear when a veteran sleeps through the night for the first time in years or remains present during a difficult conversation rather than withdrawing. Healing may be visible when a parent becomes more emotionally available to their children, when a spouse no longer feels alone inside the marriage, or when someone begins to imagine a future that extends beyond the immediate work of survival.
These changes may look small from the outside, but they can represent a profound restoration of connection, dignity, and hope. They remind us that effective treatment is not only about reducing symptoms, but about helping people participate in their own lives again.
Since 2019, VETS has supported more than 1,300 Foundational Healing Grant recipients seeking access to care and the resources needed to pursue it responsibly. Each recipient represents far more than a number. Behind every grant is a person with a history, a family, a body that has carried too much for too long, and a future that deserves to remain open.
There are spouses who have watched the people they love disappear behind trauma and gradually begin to return. There are children who have been given the chance to know a parent beyond the pain they carried home. There are veterans who have rediscovered meaning, rebuilt relationships, and begun the difficult but possible work of living rather than simply enduring.
No treatment can erase what happened, and healing does not ask a veteran to pretend that the past no longer matters. It can, however, change the relationship a person has with that past, making space for grief without allowing grief to consume everything that remains.
Freedom Must Include the Freedom to Heal
As the United States marks 250 years of independence, we are reflecting on the meaning of freedom and on the generations of people who have served in its name. For veterans living with invisible wounds, freedom is not merely a national principle or an idea preserved in history.
It is deeply personal.
Freedom may mean being able to rest without remaining alert to danger. It may mean entering a crowded room without searching for an exit, holding a child without feeling emotionally distant, or believing that love, peace, and belonging are still possible. It may mean no longer feeling imprisoned by memories, physical responses, and survival instincts formed during experiences that have already ended.
A country cannot celebrate freedom while ignoring the veterans who are unable to experience it in their own minds and bodies.
Our responsibility is not fulfilled through public praise alone. It requires us to create real pathways to care, support research and education, advocate for responsible access, and stand beside veterans and their families throughout the long process of healing. It requires us to recognize that the wounds of service are not private failures for individuals to overcome in isolation.
Treatment is an act of justice because it transforms gratitude into responsibility. It acknowledges that sacrifice creates an obligation to care for what has been injured. It affirms that veterans deserve more than survival and that their families should not be left to absorb the cost of service behind closed doors.
Join 250 for 250
The goal is not to ask every person to make the same gift. It is to bring together 250 people who believe that veterans deserve access to care, wrap-around support, and the opportunity to build lives that are not defined by invisible wounds.
Your most impactful gift can help VETS expand access to Foundational Healing Grants, preparation and integration resources, education, advocacy, and the long-term support that veterans and their families need throughout the healing process.
A donation cannot undo what a veteran has experienced, but it can help remove a barrier standing between that veteran and care. It can create the opportunity for a spouse to feel supported, for a family to regain hope, and for a veteran to pursue a future that once felt unreachable.
For 250 years, service members have answered this country’s call with courage and sacrifice. Our gratitude must be reflected in what we are willing to do when they return.
By becoming one of 250 donors , you can help turn that gratitude into action and affirm a truth that should guide how we care for every veteran.
Treatment is not a privilege. Treatment is an act of justice.