MADNESS

IN THE TRENCHES OF AMERICA’S TROUBLED DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS

by Andrea Plate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2020

Plate (Secret Police, 1981) recollects her profoundly challenging career as a social worker serving homeless and drug-addicted veterans. 

The author writes that she’d never planned to work with veterans; in fact, she took pride in being a “Red Diaper” baby who’d vehemently protested the Vietnam War as an adult. Nevertheless, after she earned a master’s degree in public policy and social work from the University of California, Los Angeles, she was assigned by a temp agency in 2002 to the West Los Angeles branch of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to work with homeless veterans who were struggling with substance abuse problems. It was a post that, in various iterations, she held for nearly 15 years, until 2017. Plate’s account skillfully combines personal memoir with institutional analysis; they strikingly dovetail when the dysfunctions of “America’s largest integrated healthcare system” compel her to become a witness to human suffering. She vividly recounts the grim challenges of working with a beleaguered population that was prone to violence and often desperate, alienated, and haunted by the trauma of war. She experienced sexual harassment—she notes that she was “fair (and easy) game” for the largely male group of patients—and was falsely accused of it, as well, she says. Despite these professional pitfalls, she found deep fulfillment in her work, and she movingly describes the experience in these pages: “For all the travails, I found an immeasurable richness in being of service to veterans,” she says. “Every day, I disappeared into the lives of others, blanketed by their anger and pain, unswervingly focused on getting veterans through the day, hidden deep within the barracks, away from civilian life.”

The author provides an astute account of various treatment strategies and their evolution over time as well as the impact of shifting public policy from one presidential administration to the next. She also incisively details how unempirical idealism can be the enemy of sound strategy, noting how “policy wonks in Washington” can be “divorced from reality.” In fact, she tells of how she grappled often with idealism herself—specifically, an unfounded conceit that she could always repair the damage done to her patients: “I would feel the urge to make him better—feed him, introduce him to friends….But feelings of this nature are unhealthy. They cloud your clinical objectivity. You have to be aware of them, then fight them off.” Plate focuses more on the “zany passion and persistence of social workers serving veterans” and on the “crushing pain but astounding resilience of veterans who come to them for help.” She affectingly relates the plights of many veterans who were struggling to keep their heads above water and how their number only increased as the nation simultaneously sustained two wars. Plate’s remembrance is as endearing as it is tough, offering a poignant but unsentimental look at an underserved group of Americans and the people trying to help them save themselves. 

A wise, unflinching memoir that candidly discusses an underappreciated segment of the American citizenry. 

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-981-4841-86-3

Page Count: 233

Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

Review Program: Kirkus Indie