Veterans face 'life or death' crisis as hundreds of therapists quit over Trump

As Jason Beaman recounts his long slog searching for mental health therapy last year, he sounds defeated.

The first therapist assigned to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs told him at their initial meeting that she was leaving the agency. A few months later, his second therapist told him she was also leaving. An appointment with a third counselor was canceled with no explanation.

These were huge setbacks for the 54-year-old veteran of the Navy and Army Reserve. Nearly a decade ago, a spiral of depression and anxiety left him homeless and living on the streets of Spokane, Washington. A VA social worker threw him a lifeline, helping him apply for benefits, find housing and get into therapy.

He still needs mental health care, he and his physician say. But bouncing from therapist to therapist has left him exhausted.

“I just quit. I don’t want to mess with the therapist anymore,” Beaman said. He spends much of his time now alone playing video games or walking with his dogs.

After President Donald Trump returned to office last year, his administration announced plans to overhaul the VA, one of the largest health care systems in the country, to deliver “the highest quality care.”

“This administration is finally going to give the veterans what they want,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said last March, as the department announced tens of thousands of job cuts.

But in interview after interview, veterans across the country told ProPublica that one year into the second Trump administration, it’s become more difficult to get treatment, as hundreds of therapists and social workers have left the VA. Many of them have not been replaced.

While front-line mental health care workers were largely exempted from the job cuts, hundreds chose to leave anyway. Some cited disagreements with new administration policies, including several targeting the LGBTQ+ community, while others, facing diminished ranks, said they simply could no longer provide proper care.

In January, the department had around 500 fewer psychologists and psychiatrists than it had at the same time last year, ProPublica found.

Although the losses represent a relatively small number — about 4% of psychologists and 6% of psychiatrists — they are notable for an agency that has long struggled with inadequate mental health staffing. For years, administrators have listed psychologists in particular among their most “severe staffing shortages.”

Mental health is not the only area where the VA has lost medical staff. The agency has eliminated more than 14,000 vacant health care positions across the system, according to data first reported by The New York Times.

Data published by the VA going back to May 2023 shows that the agency was adding psychologists every quarter until Trump’s return to the White House. Then, the trend flipped, with departures outpacing hires in all four quarters of last year.

Compounding the losses, the agency’s cohort of social workers, some of whom are licensed therapists who provide mental health counseling, declined by nearly 700 staffers over the year.

To better understand the departures and their impact on veterans’ care, ProPublica interviewed dozens of former and current VA staffers as well as patients.

ProPublica also examined a previously unreported internal employee exit survey, which included hundreds of responses from mental health care workers.

“Mental Health is understaffed, burned out, and there is not enough mental health care for the Veterans who need the services,” wrote one New York-based former employee, according to the records.

“Support is no longer there to provide ethical and good care for these Veterans,” wrote a second, based in Indiana. “Scheduling issues are incredibly high due to poor staff hiring and retainment.”

Yet another wrote that the number of new patients seeking help at their Kansas facility was far too high, making it “unethical to accept more veterans in our clinics.”

Many of those vacated positions have gone unfilled due to a yearlong hiring freeze, which was only lifted in January.

Echoing the exit survey, many who remain on staff describe crushing workloads as they struggle to fill the gaps. Those reached by ProPublica, who agreed to speak only under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that as staffing losses mount, they’ve seen their patient loads increase, while administrators shorten their appointments and pack more and more clients into group therapy sessions.

“It was always bad,” said one VA psychologist, referring to staffing at a facility in Arizona. “And now it’s at a breaking point.”

The therapist described being stretched so thin that schedulers replaced some one-on-one sessions with online group sessions that included as many as 35 veterans. The therapist said despite that they were still overloaded with individual sessions and had to limit each one to as little as 16 minutes.

The VA declined ProPublica’s request to interview an official familiar with its mental health programs. In an email, VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz accused ProPublica of attempting to mislead the public by “cherry picking issues that are limited to a handful of sites and in many cases were worse under the Biden Administration.”

He argued that the agency’s performance around mental health has improved since Trump took office, citing more than 15.5 million direct mental health care appointments in the most recent fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025), a 4% increase from the previous fiscal year. He did not say whether those additional appointments were for individual therapy. Kasperowicz also noted that the administration has opened 25 new health care clinics.

After ProPublica shared its findings and the names of veterans who would appear in this story, the agency reached out to several to inquire about their care and offer help. The veterans told ProPublica they remained skeptical that the VA would consistently respond to their mental health needs.

As the ranks of mental health care providers at the VA have shrunk, the department has proposed shifting billions of dollars into community care, a program in which veterans obtain health care via private physicians and other providers. But the program has been stretched thin amid the loss of administrative staff and ongoing issues finding private therapists, ProPublica found, with veterans encountering longer delays as they seek help.

In December, patients waited an average of around 25 days just to receive a confirmed appointment date, nearly four times the VA’s stated goal for scheduling community care.

Collins has disputed assertions that there’s a systemwide problem with access to mental health care. “And if you need emergency care, or are in a crisis situation, you have immediate care,” he told a Senate committee in January.

He said the VA’s average wait time for new patients seeking mental health care appointments was less than 20 days, the number it has set as its goal. But other VA officials have acknowledged problems with access.

“There are wait times at some facilities that are beyond what our expectations and standards would be,” Dr. Ilse Wiechers, assistant undersecretary for health for patient care services, told senators at a separate hearing.

ProPublica’s analysis found that wait times fluctuate dramatically, and fast access to care can depend on location. For example, the small clinic near Beaman’s home in rural Nebraska, with its comparatively small staff, saw appointment wait times for new mental health clients climb as high as 60 days in December and drop to 20 days in February, according to the VA figures.

But a closer look at the entire VA system reveals that a large number of facilities are struggling. In early February, more than half of its hospitals and clinics reported one-on-one mental health appointment wait times for new patients that were longer, and in some cases far longer, than the VA’s 20-day goal, according to a ProPublica analysis of data published on the agency’s website.

In late December, Beaman said he received an email from the VA saying he’d been approved for additional therapy. He was able to meet with a therapist in January — after about six months of waiting and going more than a year without a session. In the interim, he said, he relied on prescription medications, video games and his therapy dogs to keep him steady. Still, his anxiety worsened, he said, and now he often feels so uncomfortable around others that he rarely leaves his home except to walk his dogs while wearing headphones so no one speaks to him.

Kasperowicz, the VA spokesperson, wrote in his email to ProPublica that Beaman had “more than a dozen mental health visits at VA between late 2024 to mid-2025 through the Cheyenne VA clinic” in Wyoming, which is about an hour-and-a-half trip for Beaman. Kasperowicz declined, however, to say whether those appointments involved the one-on-one mental health counseling Beaman had requested. Beaman said he only had two sessions for one-on-one therapy in 2025 — meetings that were truncated because of the therapists’ impending departures.

Kasperowicz also said that one of Beaman’s appointments didn’t occur because he had “moved.” Beaman, however, said he has lived at only one address in Nebraska.

Experts warn that the exodus of mental health care providers from the VA has hurt the agency’s ability to meet veterans’ unique needs.

“VA psychologists are best in class,” said Russell Lemle, former chief psychologist for the San Francisco VA Health Care System and a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. “They have research and training and decades-long experience” working with veterans.

“When you lose them, the veterans are the ones who pay the price,” he said.

“It Could Mean Life or Death”

Michelle Phillips, 56, a Navy veteran from Ohio, saw her therapist in remote sessions once a week for two years for her PTSD. Then, in December, Phillips’ therapist told her that she was quitting the VA because of Trump’s policies.

The change, Phillips said, “could mean life or death.”

Years of depression have led Phillips to isolate. Inside her small home about an hour outside of Columbus, the city where she enlisted in 1988, the walls are filled with reminders of brighter times — photos of family members and military paraphernalia from her time in the service. Her only real company is an aging dog, and she almost never leaves.

Her virtual therapy sessions were “the only contact that I had coming in my home to talk to me every week,” she said. “And I would sit and just wait for that appointment.”

Phillips said the counselor requested that the VA continue her one-on-one remote counseling with a new therapist — which totaled about four hours per month. The agency initially offered her virtual group therapy, an option that her previous therapist dismissed as inappropriate. In the third week of January, the VA told Phillips she could have an appointment for one-on-one sessions in March. She later declined the appointment because she didn’t want to face starting over with a new therapist.

Phillips, who is disabled and doesn’t work, said she will try to pay for one-on-one therapy out of pocket with the same therapist who left the VA but will likely only be able to afford one, possibly two, sessions a month.

James Jones said his close connection to his VA therapist, who was trained in combat trauma, helped him control his PTSD-fueled episodes of anger and alcohol abuse. Now the 54-year-old Gulf War veteran, who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, has seen his care cut in half after his therapist told him colleagues had quit and he had to pick up the load.

His sessions went from an hour every week to half an hour every two weeks. “I can tell it’s rushed,” said Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. “I’m not able to work through something.”

Others have found it difficult to establish care in the first place.

Last summer, George Retes, 26, who left the Army in 2022 after serving for four years, was driving to work in Camarillo, California, when he was suddenly caught between immigration agents and protesters. Retes said the agents broke his car window, pepper-sprayed him and detained him for days. The incident, which ProPublica detailed last fall, left him shaken and exacerbated the PTSD that was first sparked after he faced missile attacks in Iraq, Retes said. (The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to ProPublica’s questions about Retes.)

Following his release, Retes found himself withdrawing from the world. “I wasn’t texting anyone or talking to anyone,” he said. “Not even my kids.”

A few weeks after being arrested, Retes sought help from the VA clinic in Ventura, California, where staffers told him they’d be in touch for an appointment. But Retes said he never heard back, even after he called to follow up. His incident with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was in July. Retes is still waiting.

According to data on the VA’s website, new patients seeking individual therapy at the Ventura clinic had to wait an average of two and a half months in early February.

The VA said it could not discuss Jones’ or Retes’ accounts because the veterans declined to waive their privacy rights.

Strains on the System

The VA overhaul has also taken a toll on mental health providers, many of whom quit after spending years at the agency.

Natalie McCarthy worked as a social worker and mental health therapist for a decade before quitting the VA in May. Like many others working in mental health, she did all of her work remotely; from her Ohio home she saw vets mostly from the Washington, D.C., area.

But McCarthy and her colleagues faced pressure to return to agency offices after the VA issued new restrictions on telehealth workers. She was uneasy about the prospect of having to conduct sessions in makeshift spaces like conference rooms filled with other counselors — a situation that raised widespread ethical concerns over the legally mandated privacy for medical conversations.

Complicating matters, McCarthy said, were Trump’s orders eliminating diversity and equity initiatives within the federal government. She said she began to worry that therapists would no longer be able to discuss the subject of race with their patients or document patients’ thoughts on the topic in their session notes. So she quit.

“I was angry that veterans were in that position,” said McCarthy, who started her own practice. “I was angry that I was in that position. It just felt like an unnecessary thing to have to navigate.”

Psychologist Mary Brinkmeyer found herself in a similar situation. She started at a VA facility in metropolitan Norfolk, Virginia, in 2022 after seeing a posting for an LGBTQ+ care coordinator, which oversees support programs for LGBTQ+ veterans and helps navigate their care. She quit last February after her superiors began enforcing Trump’s anti-diversity orders.

Brinkmeyer said she was told to stop conducting training for physicians and other staff on best practices for caring for LGBTQ+ patients. Then, she said, staff members were ordered to remove all LGBTQ+ paraphernalia from the facility such as rainbow flags, identity-affirming literature and program brochures. Also, an edict was issued directing people to use the bathroom of their gender assigned at birth, Brinkmeyer said.

That’s when the VA stopped feeling like a welcoming place. “There was a failure of empathy,” she said.

The VA did not respond directly to either Brinkmeyer’s or McCarthy’s accounts of how the administration’s policies had impacted the quality of mental health care.

Much like those seeking mental health care directly from the VA, veterans referred to community care are also struggling to secure appointments.

Gwyn Bourlakov, 58, enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1998 and over the following 21 years she was awarded a Bronze Star for her service in the invasion of Iraq, climbed the ranks to become a major and won a Fulbright scholarship to study Russian history.

Today, after a series of professional setbacks, Bourlakov works as a museum security guard. Lingering PTSD from her time in the service, coupled with deep bouts of depression over her current circumstances, have kept her seeking the VA’s help despite long-standing frustrations with its services.

After she began looking for a new therapist last year following a move to Colorado, officials at her local VA clinic in Golden said at her intake appointment that its in-house providers were swamped and could not see new patients for at least six months.

She asked if she could get help through community care, but staffers told her that the system was so overwhelmed that it would be a “nightmare,” she recalled. Veterans living in eastern Colorado waited 57 days on average to get a community care appointment scheduled in December, VA figures show.

Bourlakov said she tried to get help through a separate VA clinic, but when her phone calls went unanswered, she finally gave up.

“I don’t have time for all of that,” she explained. “It’s just like shouting into the wind.”

Following inquiries from ProPublica, VA officials reached out to Bourlakov and other veterans interviewed for this story to offer additional assistance with their mental health care. The calls left several frustrated, saying it shouldn’t take questions from the media for them to get help from the VA.

Though skeptical, Bourlakov decided to move forward. She was contacted by three separate VA representatives in February asking about her health and if she needed help scheduling a therapy appointment.

The earliest telehealth appointment they offered was not until June, she said. The next available in-person slot was not until July. Bourlakov opted for June.