Updated September 22, 2024 at 08:30 AM ET
A warning — this story contains the topic of suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for help.
At what he calls the lowest point in his life, Coast Guard veteran Jorel Wester went to a sandwich shop for what he thought would be his last meal.
“I was sitting in my car in the parking lot and I had this pistol in my lap and I was like, this is the moment," he told NPR. "I went to grab a drink and on the side of the cup, it had this advertisement for K9s for Warriors, saying they help pair veterans with service dogs for PTSD. I’m like well, I’m going to give them a call and if somebody answers, I’m going to tell them what’s happening.”
Wester said he had been told by doctors that he had post-traumatic stress from more than a decade of doing search and rescue.
“All those little boxes you put your traumas in — I mean, I responded to Katrina and we were putting bodies in bags daily. You think, ‘I’ll deal with that later.’ Well, ‘later’ kind of creeps up on you,” he said. “I started having problems with sleeping and pain, and the more I thought, the more that suicide came to the forefront.”
The voice on the other end of the line convinced Wester to disassemble his firearm, and pledged to get him into their program for a service dog if he started to go to counseling.
The decision was life-changing.
After about a year on a waiting list, Wester was paired with a black lab named Betsy.
“It was almost like we’d known each other forever,” Wester recalled feeling when he first met her. “It was one of those emotional bliss moments — I’m happy now and I haven’t felt this way in a very long time.”
Wester says after about a year together, his doctors told him he had improved so much that they wanted to take him off three anxiety medications.
“It’s profound,” Wester said. “That was almost more of an emotional impact than the decision I made to take my own life. It felt like I got my life back at that point.”
Lawmakers see a way to help at-risk veterans
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. Congress is pushing to make it easier for veterans like Wester to be paired with service dogs.
“Suicide among veterans — we just have not figured that out,” Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, told NPR. “And until we figure this out, we’ve got to throw everything at it we can, and if these service animals are one large step in the right direction, I’m all in.”
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, suicide was the second-leading cause of death in 2021 among veterans under 45 years old.
Luttrell’s bill, the Service Dogs Assisting Veterans Act, would designate $10 million a year for five years to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which would then award grants to nonprofit organizations that train and provide service dogs to eligible veterans.
K9s for Warriors, the organization that Wester called, is one of those groups.
Its CEO, Daniel Bean, said the organization depends on donations to fund its operations and that federal dollars would be a game changer.
“There are hundreds of thousands of veterans that we can’t reach because the service dog industry does not have enough funds,” he said at a press conference this past week alongside lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The legislation is still in early days process-wise, but already has bipartisan and bicameral support.
“For $10 million a year, we can save veterans’ lives,” said Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Ky, one of the cosponsors of the bill. “But I turn it the other way around — what is the cost of us not doing this? The cost is that we are going to lose more of our sons and daughters who were willing to put on the uniform and sacrifice everything for us.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs told NPR it’s unable to comment on pending legislation, but that the VA “continues its efforts in piloting a program providing canine training to eligible veterans diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
Luttrell said he’s hopeful the legislation can advance before the end of the year.
“We often talk about the physical wounds of war, but we cannot forget the invisible wounds — post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries and emotional scars of military sexual trauma,” he said. “Far too many of our veterans find themselves isolated, struggling to reintegrate into civilian life.”
A recent study found service dogs lower PTSD severity
Luttrell and other advocates point to a recent study led by Maggie O’Haire, the associate dean for research at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Arizona.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and compared two groups of veterans with PTSD — ones researchers placed with service dogs and ones who remained on the waiting list.
“The tasks [the dogs] do are things like interrupting anxiety or a panic attack, interrupting a nightmare, helping the person stay present in the face of flashbacks,” O’Haire said. “The person can ask for a certain command, like applied pressure or ‘come up onto my lap’ when they feel a panic attack coming on.”
Participants wore wristbands so researchers could track their sleep data, and also provided saliva samples so researchers could monitor their level of cortisol — a stress hormone.
“For a healthy adult who does not have PTSD, you're going to see a nice peak [in cortisol] in the morning after they wake up. It's how the body prepares for the day,” O’Haire explained. “For many individuals with PTSD, we see that blunted. Their body has been so hypervigilant and constantly stressed that no longer is their cortisol rising in the morning.”
She said they found that veterans with a service dog showed a rise in the morning typical of a healthy adult.
“We saw better outcomes in the service dog group in nearly every area that we measured, and specifically service dogs were associated with 66% lower odds of a clinician PTSD diagnosis,” she said. “After only three months, we saw significant changes. We also saw lower PTSD severity, anxiety, depression, less social isolation, and higher quality of life.”
O’Haire acknowledged service dogs are a personalized intervention and “can’t and won’t be for everyone.”
But for those who do want a service dog, she says a consistent barrier remains long wait times.
“[These veterans are] in a dark place, and when they find out a service dog is an option, they do feel hope. And then they find out that it’s going to be two years,” she said. “I do not think the current nonprofit model can serve the need or demand of veterans who are interested in this intervention.”
The problem of wait times
Lawmakers and advocates say this proposed legislation would help tackle the problem of long wait times if groups have more funds to train more dogs.
As the bill works its way through the Congress, advocates say they’re aware how many veterans continue to suffer.
Wester says there's power in having more open and honest conversations about what veterans can face.
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