by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi

This article contains descriptions of mental illness and suicide.

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A veteran with a known history of suicidal thoughts showed up at a St. Louis hospital before dawn one morning and was left unmonitored in an exam room for hours.

Another was deemed at risk of suicide by a hospital psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., then forcibly discharged, even as he tried to stay, by the same hospital’s emergency department.

Another still in Pittsburgh was assigned a behavioral health nurse who failed to complete thorough suicide screenings or review his suicide safety plan, and didn’t follow up when he said he wished he was dead.

In all three cases, independent inspectors documented serious failures by the Department of Veterans Affairs. And in all three cases, the veterans involved went on to kill themselves or other people.

The lapses were similar to ones examined by ProPublica last week in an investigation of the VA’s handling of two veterans with serious mental disorders. Both suffered for years with inadequate care from the same clinic in Northern California, they told reporters. Their stories ended in tragedy.

The problems appear to be systemic. Over and over, the hospitals and clinics in the VA’s sprawling health care network have fallen short when it comes to treating people with mental illness.

That conclusion emerges from a ProPublica review of all of the reports published by the VA’s inspector general since 2020. That includes 162 regular surveys of facilities and 151 investigations that were triggered by a complaint or call to the office on a wide variety of alleged health care problems.

If you or someone you know needs help:

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741
• If you are a veteran, call the Veterans Crisis Line: 988, then press 1

Issues with mental health care surfaced in half of the routine inspections. Employees botched screenings meant to assess veterans’ risk of suicide or violence; sometimes they didn’t perform the screenings at all. They missed mandatory mental health training programs and failed to follow up with patients as required by VA protocol.

One in 4 of the reports stemming from calls or complaints detailed similar breakdowns. In the most extreme cases, facilities lost track of veterans or failed to prevent suicides under their own roofs.

Sixteen veterans who received the substandard care killed either themselves or other people, the review revealed. An additional five died for reasons related to the poor care, such as a bad drug interaction that the reports say could have been prevented. Twenty-one such deaths is a meaningful count even for a health care system that has more than 9 million people enrolled, in the view of Charles Figley, a Tulane University professor and expert in military mental health. The VA has struggled with mental health care for decades, he said. “It’s a national disgrace.”

For grieving family members, it is incomprehensible. “It was never my expectation that [the VA was] going to solve his problems,” said Colin Domek, the son of the veteran in Pittsburgh. “My expectations were that someone who was saying ‘help me’ would receive some kind of help.”

The inspector general reports reviewed by ProPublica have limitations. The individual investigations can be narrow. The reports offer only broad suggestions as to whether individuals should be held accountable for breakdowns and provide little sense of whether they actually were. Even together, they don’t capture the full reality of the VA’s 1,300 health care facilities. But they do start to assemble a meaningful picture of the system’s most chronic shortcomings when it comes to treating people with mental illness.

The VA declined requests for an interview for this story. In a statement to ProPublica, VA press secretary Terrence Hayes said “there is nothing more important to VA than providing high-quality mental health care to Veterans” and that the agency was “grateful” to the inspector general’s office for its oversight. He noted that last year, more than 80% of veterans who participated in VA surveys reported being satisfied with the mental health care they received through the agency.

In a separate statement, VA Inspector General Michael Missal said, “Our reports have repeatedly illustrated that it is critical that [Veterans Health Administration] leaders remain vigilant to problems, ensure care is coordinated, and take swift, responsive actions that address root causes and promote accountability.”

The VA’s health care system is the nation’s largest. The agency operates about 170 medical centers and 1,100 outpatient sites, and it provides counseling services at some 300 facilities known as vet centers. In the last fiscal year, the VA provided mental health services to about 2 million veterans, according to agency figures.

The system has notable strengths. The VA has played an important role in developing treatments for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, and provides critical training opportunities for psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers nationwide.

But the number of suicides among veterans has remained stubbornly high, ticking up to 6,392 in 2021, the most recent year in agency statistics. And acts of violence by veterans with mental illnesses have continued making news, including two mass shootings in Atlanta last year alone.

Experts told ProPublica the failures revealed in the inspector general reports point to broad problems, including inadequate mental health........

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