When Distance Becomes Detachment

October 7, 2025

We’re only a few weeks away from Veterans Day, when the country pauses to remember those who served. It’s a good thing to honor sacrifice. But for many veterans, what’s missing isn’t appreciation — it’s access. We don’t need another parade as much as we need consistent care, someone who answers the phone, a place to be seen. Because distance doesn’t always look like miles on a map. Sometimes it’s the space between a veteran and the help they’ve been promised. And when that distance grows, it becomes detachment.

The Wounds Beneath the Surface

In 2018, a peer-reviewed study in the American Psychological Association’s journal Psychological Services recorded interviews with veterans who had sought mental-health treatment through the VA. One said, “I’m not going to call them — because they won’t respond anyway.” Another confessed, “I feel like a burden when I try to use VA services.”

Those voices came from Elbogen et al.’s Veteran-Centered Barriers to VA Mental Healthcare Services, archived in the NIH database (PMC6069794). The researchers concluded that many veterans avoided help not because they didn’t value it, but because they no longer trusted that anyone would answer. It wasn’t simply a gap in services — it was a fracture in belonging.

The Pattern Persists

Seven years later, Reuters published “VA Shake-Up Disrupts Mental Health Services for Some U.S. Veterans.” It told the story of Joey Cortez, an Air Force veteran who waited months for a mental-health appointment, only to find no record of his request after internal staffing cuts. Across the country, appointments were canceled, crisis lines rerouted, and counselors left uncertain whether they were even authorized to return calls.

Read side by side, the research and the reporting tell the same story: distance has become detachment. What veterans feared in 2018 — that the system wouldn’t respond — became their lived reality in 2025.

When Distance Becomes Detachment

Telehealth has been a gift for many. It bridges miles, offers privacy, and keeps care accessible for veterans in rural or underserved areas. But even the best technology can’t replace what happens when two people share a room — when empathy can be seen, not streamed.

There is something about sitting face-to-face with a trained mental-health professional that is truly superior. Healing often begins not with words, but with presence — the kind you can feel in the air.

And that’s what so many veterans are losing: presence. Not just appointments or benefits, but the human nearness that reminds them they still belong to something worth living for.

Most VA programs and support groups operate during standard business hours — convenient for the system, but not always for the people it serves. For younger veterans juggling jobs, family, or school, that schedule can shut the door on care. And for those living in rural areas, where the nearest clinic may be an hour away, distance becomes another invisible barrier.

A screen can keep you alive for a night. But a counselor, pastor, or friend who sits beside you can bring light into that dark night and bring you back to life.

When distance turns into detachment, people start to disappear — not only from systems, but from hope. And that’s not a veteran issue; it’s a human one. Detachment doesn’t depend on age, but on zip code. Rural communities, inner cities, suburban cul-de-sacs — isolation can grow anywhere the human touch has been replaced by efficiency.

What It Says About Us

The persistence of these invisible wounds reveals more than a bureaucratic failure; it’s a moral one. A society that praises service but neglects the servant has lost its capacity for empathy. We can build bigger hospitals and faster networks, but if we can’t keep presence at the center of care, we will keep losing people — quietly, invisibly, tragically.

It’s beautiful to visit veterans around Veterans Day — to shake hands, share meals, and offer words of thanks. But our mental health and emotional wellbeing need attention year-round. Presence can’t be seasonal. Gratitude can’t be ceremonial.

The distance that becomes detachment doesn’t happen all at once; it grows in the quiet months after the parades. It’s the missed check-in, the unanswered message, the neighbor we meant to call. Healing requires rhythm, not ritual — steady connection, not occasional gestures.

So as the flags wave and the tributes flow, let them remind us to keep showing up when the crowds have gone home. Because the need for presence never ends — and neither should our compassion.

Distance will always be a part of life. But detachment? That’s a choice.

#VeteransDay#MentalHealthAwareness#InvisibleWounds#VeteranSupport#CommunityCare#HumanConnection#EndTheStigma#TheOutsidersTable#RenegadeCleric#RePresence