September is National Veteran Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month, and the Cherokee County Homeless Veteran Program (CCHVP) has released a new video targeted at getting veterans to know that they are not alone with their struggle to get help they need. The video shows a veteran struggling with mental health, and another veteran comes to his aid with our outreach tagline “Don’t Struggle Alone.” At the end of the video, it provides our website where veterans in need of mental health can get immediate support.
Thomas M. Brady American Legion Post 45 (Canton, Ga.) post service officer and CCHVP founder/director Jim Lindenmayer promotes this video as another veteran outreach program target at the thousands of veterans we do not know about who may need our help. Our program has been awarded two national veteran-mental-health grants, including the VA SSG Fox Grant as well as a $1.2 million SAMHSA mental health grant with their partner About FACE-USA. The programs we have developed have served hundreds of veterans with mental health issues, and the program provides peer-to-peer counseling, individual mental health counseling and financial counseling.
As part of our program, we are looking for any additional issues veterans in our care may have. One of the biggest issues we have uncovered is that many female veterans we have worked with were not just suffering from mental health and homeless issues but were victims of domestic violence - over the past year, 14 female veterans from all service branches. We are now working with civilian and local and state agencies to create a pilot tracking program.

To view the video we have launched, please visit our Facebook page located at:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064755820523i

In the two years we have had our mental health programs in place, we have only had one veteran suicide. Our program covers over 20,000 veterans, and Cherokee County is the sixth-largest veteran community in Georgia. CCHVP is based out of Post 45 and supports 18 other VSO groups, include Post 316 in Woodstock and Post 149 in Jasper, as well as two VFW posts, two Marine Corps Leagues and a number of independent veteran organizations.