About Our Stories

My name is Mike Coonan. I was a Navy Corpsman in Vietnam; my job was to keep my Marines alive. I was wounded in combat, I am a licensed mental health clinician, and the founder of On Point 4 Veterans. On Point 4 Veterans exists to keep you alive and connect you to VA care and benefits you have earned. My primary work is helping you with your serious mental health conditions to reach real VA psychiatric treatment when VA barriers, gatekeeping, or misdirection stand in the way. At the same time, we walk along together as you move through the VA disability system, helping ensure your mental health conditions are accurately recognized and your service is appropriately compensated.

Let me be clear: We do not want you to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to file a VA disability claim with an online VA Benefits company.  And you should not be kept in the dark about how the VA system works. Our goal is simple: we want to save your life, save you money, and help you prepare your PTSD/MST/Mental Health disability claim. If you go to our website, we will show you how to prepare your own VA disability claim for PTSD or other service-connected mental health conditions, for free. We use plain English, no gimmicks, no guarantees.  If you need our help, we charge a flat fee of $600. 

We hope you can Do It Yourself for free.

The Following Are Our VA War Stories: 

For many veterans, the most difficult battle does not end when they leave the battlefield. It begins when they finally ask the Department of Veterans Affairs for mental health care, and discover that access to psychiatric treatment is blocked, delayed, or quietly redirected. Over decades of working with veterans, I have heard the same story repeated in different voices, from different wars, and from different parts of the country. Veterans seek help for nightmares, panic, rage, depression, and suicidal thoughts. They show up at the VA as instructed. And instead of receiving timely psychiatric evaluation and treatment, they encounter gatekeeping, fragmentation, and a system that treats their suffering as a series of disconnected symptoms rather than the result of service-connected trauma.

One Vietnam combat veteran summed it up with devastating clarity: “My body came home. My head didn’t.”  Click on VA War Stories

He served in artillery near the Cambodian border in 1971. Incoming rockets and mortars were routine. Friends were wounded and killed. He carried bodies to medevac helicopters. When he returned home, he could not sleep, startled at sudden noises, drank heavily, and slowly withdrew from his family. He did not know the term PTSD. He only knew something inside him had shifted and never settled back. Years later, when he turned to the VA, the care never added up. Appointments were brief and transactional. Medications changed without explanation. No one took the time to connect combat exposure, sleep disturbance, anger, alcohol use, isolation, and declining function into a coherent clinical picture. PTSD was never clearly explained. Psychiatry was out of reach.

This veteran eventually reached a breaking point and was hospitalized after a suicide attempt. Those VA records later went missing. His discharge paperwork was incomplete. Despite documented artillery service, the VA questioned whether he had been in Vietnam at all. Without proper documentation, his combat trauma was effectively erased.

This is not an isolated failure. Veterans across eras report being diverted away from psychiatrists even when presenting with severe mental health symptoms. Instead, they are routed through layers of counseling or intake appointments that do not provide diagnosis, treatment planning, or meaningful relief. Many are told, explicitly or implicitly, that VA clinicians cannot assist with disability documentation, leaving veterans to navigate a complex and adversarial claims process alone. Spouses often see the damage first. They manage medications, track appointments, de-escalate crises, and absorb the emotional fallout. Yet spouses are frequently excluded from evaluations and treatment discussions, despite being the most consistent witnesses to the veteran’s daily functioning. Excluding them is not clinically sound, and it undermines care.

When this same veteran finally received a comprehensive Military History Psychosocial Assessment outside the VA, something changed. For the first time, someone slowed down and listened from beginning to end. His life was treated as a connected story, not a checklist. Combat trauma, post-service adjustment, work history, substance use, medical decline, and family impact were documented in context.

Even then, the VA system resisted. A referral described as “psychiatric” turned out not to be. A gatekeeper attempted to redirect care away from psychiatry yet again. Records proving Vietnam service had to be reconstructed piece by piece because official documentation was incomplete or wrong. This took persistence, advocacy, and hundreds of miles of travel, work no veteran in crisis should have to do. Eventually, the evidence was undeniable. A VA psychiatrist provided an expert medical opinion. The veteran was awarded a 100% disability rating. Proper diagnosis and treatment finally followed. But the cost was staggering, more than forty years without adequate care. That lost time cannot be returned.

This is the real crisis facing veterans’ mental health care. Not that veterans fail to seek help, but that when they do, the system too often fails to meet them. Policies that emphasize “counseling first” while delaying or restricting psychiatric access leave veterans with serious conditions untreated. Clinical silos prevent VA providers from fully addressing disability-related mental health needs. Missing records, incomplete service documentation, and administrative gatekeeping compound the harm.

These are not rare exceptions. They are repeated experiences shared by veterans and their families across generations. Veterans should not have to fight confusion, stigma, and bureaucracy on top of trauma. They should not need outside intervention just to see a psychiatrist. And they should never be made to feel that telling the truth about their service is somehow inconvenient or suspect.

Listening, really listening, should not be the exception. It should be the standard.

Prepared by Mike Coonan LMSW ACSW BCD

Purple Heart Combat Veteran The Walking Dead