Colorado first lady Jeannie Ritter is headlining a new campaign to bring more mental-health services to rural areas for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The campaign, called the Civilians for Veterans Fund, is a coalition of several mental-health groups and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that will raise money to provide mental-health services in places where they are not easily accessible and to troops and their families who might otherwise fall through the cracks.
“Colorado has a lot of National Guard troops and reservists,” Ritter said. “Those men and women aren’t necessarily attached to a unit where they would be stationed on a base. These men and women, when they finish their duty, they go back to their day jobs, and they don’t have access to the mental-health services.”
Ritter said the campaign won’t create new mental-health services but will extend existing VA services to rural areas.
“This is something different,” she said. “This is collaborative.”
The campaign, initiated with a $50,000 grant from the Firefly Fund, will initially focus on Montrose County, the San Luis Valley and southeastern Colorado, including La Junta and Lamar. Doyle Forrestal, the director of public policy for the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council, which is part of the campaign, said the group doesn’t have numbers for how many residents in those areas have served in recent wars.
But, she said, community mental health groups in those areas say they are seeing more veterans, and rural areas’ enlistment rates tend to be higher than in urban areas.
“The need to provide services for the returning veterans will likely continue for many years,” she said.
John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com
