Wounded Warrior Homes expands mission to prioritize mental health support for veterans

“We’ve been very good at placing vets with outside services, but the problem for those with mental health issues is that the turnaround time with the VA and other organizations is six to seven months. That’s just too long,” says Rick Espitia, Executive Director of Wounded Warrior Homes, a San Marcos-based nonprofit whose mission is to provide re-integrative support services to veterans. “We had no control over timing. We had no control over the quality of care. And in the interim we would often lose track of the veterans we were trying to serve.”

Founded in 2010, Wounded Warrior Homes is focused on providing housing for unhoused veterans and those in danger of becoming homeless. Housing is still an essential part of the mission, but Espitia, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who became executive director in February of this year, has realigned the organization’s priorities, recognizing that today’s veterans need mental health support as much as or more than anything else.

Recent data shows that 17.6 veterans die by suicide each day. “Not per year or per week,” Espitia says. “There are more deaths by suicide than we had on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like my veterans, I’ve had friends in the military who’ve gone over the edge, and we always wonder what we could have done better to prevent it.”

That is the reason Espitia, who served for three years on the Wounded Warrior Homes’ board before being asked to take over as executive director, has made mental health support an integral part of organization’s services. “We now have counselors both in the facility and via tele-med. We are also teaming with Serene Health so that I can recommend a vet and know they will get a response within two to three days,” says Espitia.

Among other things, Serene Health offers Mindset, personalized, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a new treatment that is recognized for relieving symptoms related to anxiety, depression, and other psychological disorders. “I went through the program myself before agreeing to work with them. I know the benefits of the treatment and other people it has also helped,” Espitia says.

In addition to Operation Mental Health, which officially launches August 1, Wounded Warrior Homes also just opened its first Women’s Veteran Center, a house in Escondido that has been completely renovated to be the home for two women veterans and their children.

The Veterans Administration characterizes women as the fastest-growing population in both military service and the veteran community. “I have attended meetings of many local veteran organizations, and it was quickly evident that women were not being fully supported,” Espitia says.

“For people who serve, there are two key moments in the service: when they join and when they leave,” Espitia says. “But there are also two key moments after that: when they get out and when they successfully integrate into civilian life. It’s that moment when they get out that we are now approaching from a much more holistic perspective. When we work with a veteran, we offer mental health services, education, and employment support for as long as it takes, even a year or more.”

As Espitia learned over time, there are numerous organizations that provide temporary housing. “But most provide hotel vouchers,” he explains. “How would you feel as an eight-year-old, living in a hotel room for a couple of weeks and then having to move to another hotel?”

“That’s why we wanted the house in Escondido to be really nice,” Espitia continues. “We want these veterans to know their service is appreciated as they get themselves and their families on their feet in the civilian world.”

Wounded Warrior Homes prioritizes veterans who have served since 9/11 and who suffer from combat-related disabilities, including post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries.

As professionals now understand, a soldier does not have to be hit in the head with a piece of shrapnel to suffer a brain injury. Repeated exposure to explosions can injure the brain in the way repeated concussions do in football. And even when there is no physical brain injury, the repeated adrenaline rush of the battlefield can alter brainwaves similar to addiction, causing some veterans to put themselves in increasingly dangerous situations looking for that battlefield sensation. “You hear of motorcycle suicides. People going too fast or going off a cliff,” says Espitia. “For at least some of them, it was an accident. They were going after that adrenaline rush.”

Nearly half a million veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer post-traumatic stress — 22 percent of all injuries — more than half of whom have never consulted a physician or mental health professional, which is the reason Wounded Warrior Homes has shifted its focus.

In addition to the house in Escondido, the organization maintains a men’s house in Vista that currently has six veterans living in it, and they also operate a food pantry that serves more than 200 veterans of all ages who struggle with food insecurity. They even offer food for pets through coordination with AniMeals, a program offered by Helen Woodward Animal Center. woundedwarriorhomes.org