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New Center Counsels Vets With PTSD

A group that counsels veterans with PTSD now has a permanent home in San Antonio. At the new Veterans Center, vets are learning from other vets how to heal.

For the past year, the San Antonio chapter of the PTSD Foundation of America has been meeting in borrowed space. Now thanks almost entirely to donations, they have a home in north central San Antonio.

Tom Clutts, the managing director, knows the importance of vet to vet counseling returning military will receive here. He served in Iraq and was diagnosed with PTSD nine years ago.

“I was married, had five children. You can imagine a house full of elementary school kids,” Clutts says.” All that stress just added to the stress I already had coming back from combat. My kids would come up and simple questions like, ‘Hey Dad, can you help me with my homework?’ and I would flip over the table and start throwing things around the house and storm out and go get drunk.”

Now he serves as a mentor. He says 74 percent of U.S. military have some degree of PTSD. Twenty three veterans commit suicide every day. He says vet to vet counseling is one of the most effective ways to heal.

“As a veteran is overcoming his PTSD, the natural tendency is for that veteran to start to give back to other veterans. That’s how the peer to peer network works,” Clutts says.

The new Veterans Center provides free mentoring for vets and their families.   

Louisa Jonas is an independent public radio producer, environmental writer, and radio production teacher based in Baltimore. She is thrilled to have been a PRX STEM Story Project recipient for which she produced a piece about periodical cicadas. Her work includes documentaries about spawning horseshoe crabs and migratory shorebirds aired on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. Louisa previously worked as the podcast producer at WYPR 88.1FM in Baltimore. There she created and produced two documentary podcast series: Natural Maryland and Ascending: Baltimore School for the Arts. The Nature Conservancy selected her documentaries for their podcast Nature Stories. She has also produced for the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s Distillations Podcast. Louisa is editor of the book Backyard Carolina: Two Decades of Public Radio Commentary. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her training also includes journalism fellowships from the Science Literacy Project and the Knight Digital Media Center, both in Berkeley, CA. Most recently she received a journalism fellowship through Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she traveled to Toolik Field Station in Arctic Alaska to study climate change. In addition to her work as an independent producer, she teaches radio production classes at Howard Community College to a great group of budding journalists. She has worked as an environmental educator and canoe instructor but has yet to convince a great blue heron to squawk for her microphone…she remains undeterred.