OKALOOSA COUNTY TO GET NEW VA MENTAL HEALTH CENTER

This is a huge step in meeting the increasing demands on medical care for our active, former, and retired military members in our area. This decision to place this facility here in our area in just one more step in recognizing what Eglin AFB means to the country today and in the future. As noted below, we not only have thousands of veterans in our area, with more veterans and retired members coming all the time, coming to enjoy the many amenities Eglin AFB has to offer to its men and women of the Armed Forces.


VA mental health center OK’d
By KATIE TAMMEN Northwest Florida Daily News 315-4440 katiet@nwfdailynews.com Staff Writer Tom McLaughlin contributed to this report.

A veterans mental health center will open in Okaloosa County next year. Few details about the new center were available Friday afternoon, but the facilities traditionally offer an array of programs, including mental health screenings and post-traumatic stress disorder counseling, according to a news release from U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller. Right now, the Department of Veterans Affairs operates more than 230 such community outreach centers across the country to provide services to veterans and their families. Each center is staffed with social workers, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, counselors and outreach specialists — most of whom are veterans themselves. “It’s more great news for Okaloosa County,” said Miller, R-Chumuckla. Construction is expected to begin soon, but a site had not been selected as of Friday afternoon, Miller said. The center likely will not be built on Air Force property, he added. The decision to build a center in Okaloosa is partly because of the persistence of residents such as County Judge Patt Maney, a former brigadier general in the Army Reserve. “It was really a community effort. It’s a tremendous testimony to the community’s loyalty to their veterans and their families,” Maney said. Friday’s news was about two years in the making. Maney began campaigning for a center in Okaloosa in 2007 to help meet the needs of the county’s 33,000 veterans. Over the years, Maney has seen a number of veterans in his courtroom who could get the services they needed only if a veterans center opened in the area. When Maney received the news Friday, he said he felt “excitement, enthusiasm and gratitude.” “We had an awful lot of people working to make this happen,” he said. A spokesperson for the VA couldn’t be reached late Friday afternoon.