The San Diego VA has repeatedly lied about why it’s changing drug treatments for veterans at high risk of suicide, documents show.
An inewsource investigation published this month found the healthcare system is pulling depressed and suicidal veterans off ketamine, an effective drug, and putting them on a nasal spray called Spravato — which is not working and in some cases is increasing their suicidal thoughts. That story explained how the change in treatment sparked a veteran’s suicide and led to a congressional inquiry.
inewsource asked the San Diego VA why it made the decision. Its responses were conflicting and untrue.
Why this matters
Nearly a quarter million veterans live in the region covered by the VA San Diego Healthcare System, a publicly funded agency that’s legally required to be transparent. It currently provides medical services to more than 86,000 veterans in San Diego and Imperial counties.
The taxpayer-funded government agency is legally required to be transparent and accountable to the public. But during the past two years of inewsource’s coverage of the institution, its spokespeople have declined to respond to questions about dangerous and unethical human research at its facility, whistleblower retaliation, a COVID-19 outbreak at a counseling center and now the situation involving suicidal veterans. They will not address how VA records contradict their public statements.
Meanwhile, more veterans who have been removed from the ketamine treatments are coming forward out of anger and desperation.
“If anybody cared about us, the only time would be if 10 of us kill ourselves at one time,” said Tom Johan, a 73-year-old Air Force veteran in Ramona.
He’s one of eight veterans the VA pulled off ketamine treatments at the Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute in La Jolla. There are 17 more patients who will be transitioned within the next few months.
Suicide prevention help
If you are having thoughts of suicide, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255 or the San Diego Access and Crisis Line at (888) 724-7240.
Other resources are available here.
The VA is putting these vets on Spravato, which is administered at the VA Medical Center across the street from Kadima. Johan and three other veterans interviewed said Spravato did nothing for them.
Ketamine is an anesthetic that’s been around since the 1960s but was recently recognized as highly effective in treating depression and suicidal thoughts.
A Yale psychiatrist in 2018 called it “arguably the greatest breakthrough in the field of depression in over 60 years.”
Spravato is a derivative of ketamine manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, and last year President Donald Trump promoted it as a game changer in combating veteran suicides.
“It really takes that horrible anxiety, whatever causes somebody to be so desperate to commit suicide, you take it, it’s an inhaler, and you take it and its results are incredible,” Trump told an AMVETS convention last August.
Spravato was fast-tracked through the FDA approval process and has become controversial among medical experts who question its safety, efficacy and cost.
Forcing veterans to switch to the drug from ketamine, Johan said, is “absolutely the most dangerous malpractice I’ve ever seen.”
No veteran interviewed said they had received a straight answer from the VA about why it’s stopping treatments at Kadima. Neither has inewsource.
Johan and other veterans in his situation are considered “captured patients,” said Dwight Stirling, founder and CEO of the Center for Law and Military Policy, a nonprofit think tank in Huntington Beach.
These vets are often labeled 100% disabled by the VA, unable to work and therefore reliant upon the VA healthcare system, he said. They can’t decide they’re unhappy with VA care and move to another hospital.
“Here we take the vets who are hurt the most as a result of their service and we put them into a system on the hospital side where they have no right to hold their doctors to account whatsoever,” said Stirling, a reserve judge advocate general in the California National Guard and a law professor at the University of Southern California.
“And so it’s the population that we should be caring about the most. We have a system where we care about them the least.”
“The discovery of the rapid, efficacious, and sustained effects of ketamine is arguably the greatest breakthrough in the field of depression in over 60 years.”
A VETERAN’S SUICIDE AND POOR COMMUNICATION
The San Diego VA has sent at least 32 veterans to Kadima since 2017 but stopped authorizing their treatments last September.
In mid-October, a Navy and Marine pilot who’d been receiving ketamine at the clinic died by suicide. She wrote in her final email that the VA’s decision had pushed her over the edge. It was like losing a lifeline, she said.
Within days of the suicide, the VA rushed to authorize treatments for nearly all the vets under Kadima’s care. The San Diego VA director signed a Veterans Care Agreement with the clinic, which is used when the VA network can’t offer a needed service or treatment and must rely on an outside provider for care.
But nothing really changed.
Kadima staff spent more than six months struggling with the VA to obtain further authorizations for the vets, to little success. Then on May 1, a VA psychiatrist began alerting patients they would be cut off from ketamine at Kadima and were expected to return to the medical center for Spravato.
Kiaya Bender, a Marine veteran from Vista who said he’s struggled with PTSD, depression and suicidal thoughts since he can remember, began treatments at Kadima last year. After a few sessions that didn’t do much, he woke up one day to find “things seemed brighter.”
“From there, I’ve been able to find a hobby and passion, like plants and gardening, and start going to school and setting goals and sticking to things longer than three to six months,” Bender said.
Then the veteran choked up as he recalled being notified about the impending switch to Spravato.
“I’m a little emotional about it, because it scares me,” he said.
inewsource first asked the VA in May about why the treatment was changed. A spokesperson explained that before January the agency didn’t provide IV ketamine or Spravato but “has since established the capacity to provide both treatments on-site.”
But patient authorization forms contradict that. They show in April the VA was still sending veterans to Kadima because the agency couldn’t provide ketamine in-house.
“No Network Provider Available” is cited in multiple forms that month as the “Reason for the use of the Veterans Care Agreement.”
The VA also said it had “communicated to patients and Kadima leaders” the reasons behind the transition. That is a lie:
- Every vet inewsource interviewed said they were given little to no warning or explanation for the change.
- Kadima psychiatrist and founder Dr. David Feifel and his chief operating officer, Renee St.Clair, produced emails showing the clinic was caught completely off guard by the VA’s move. Feifel and St.Clair also told inewsource the VA has made no effort to discuss continuity of care or collaborate on a transition plan for the veterans.
- Included in Kadima’s documents was an April 17 email from Dr. David Printz, the VA psychiatrist for many of the veterans interviewed. It shows Printz reassuring one of his patients being treated at Kadima that “the VA has no intention of discontinuing ketamine treatment in the community for you and other veterans.” Two weeks later, Printz let Kadima know the VA would be discontinuing the ketamine treatments.
inewsource also learned this month that the San Diego VA had sent a very different explanation of its actions to a reporter at another publication. We asked VA spokespeople to provide that email, but they have not.
Then they asked multiple times for inewsource to explain more about the story being worked on before they would provide answers. In one instance, they asked to be walked through the story “from start to finish.”
inewsource refused because it deviates from standard journalism reporting practices and is not required under the Freedom of Information Act in seeking public records.
“It’s clear to me that the VA has been caught in a lie,” said Stirling, the USC professor and think tank CEO.
“And they are doing exactly what they always do in such a situation, which is to try to get the reporter who has them caught off their backs.”
Last week, the VA spokespeople provided a new explanation for stopping the treatment:
They said Kadima had “repeatedly deviated from industry standards of care and from what VA had authorized by administering intramuscular ketamine.”
‘DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO DEFLECT BLAME’
The San Diego VA wasn’t taking issue with ketamine but rather how it was often administered at Kadima — with an injection rather than an intravenous drip. A VA spokesperson said the injection route “is not FDA approved and is not supported by any peer reviewed research to support its long-term use for Treatment Resistant Depression.”
Several parts of the VA explanation are either misleading or untrue.
The VA’s authorization forms, which contain notes and messages between VA doctors, show the agency’s psychiatrists and administrators had authorized and known about intramuscular injections at Kadima since 2018.
VA psychiatrist Printz and chief of psychiatry Dr. Brian Martis authorized 20 “IM (intramuscular) Ketamine injections” at Kadima for a depressed vet in September 2018. They authorized another 24 for a different vet in June 2019.
In March, a different VA psychiatrist made note that his patient at Kadima, “has now been on IM ketamine treatments for the past 9 months” and “though he still struggles with chronic depression, his suicidal ideation and ability to function is much improved.”
On April 2, a note shows Dr. Susan Trompeter, the medical director for San Diego VA Community Care, recapping one patient’s care at Kadima with the VA’s head of psychiatry: “The patient has had repeated problems with IV ketamine infusions. … Because of this, he was switched back to IM ketamine.”
VA spokespeople would not reconcile these facts despite multiple inewsource requests.
They did, however, insist the authorizations were for Spravato or IV ketamine only, “as designated in the Veterans Care Agreement.” That is false, according to the agreement, which Kadima provided.
It shows a boilerplate contract that makes no mention of Spravato, IV ketamine, intramuscular ketamine or even ketamine at all.
Feifel, Kadima’s founder, is a UC San Diego professor emeritus of psychiatry. He was responsible for bringing ketamine treatment to the university and founding the psychiatry department’s advanced treatment program. Feifel’s colleagues at the San Diego VA noticed his success with ketamine and began sending over high-risk veterans for treatment.
Asked to respond to the VA’s latest explanation for stopping veterans from being treated at Kadima, Feifel wrote to inewsource: “It is mind blowing that administrators who decided to suddenly cancel a successful treatment program that had been keeping veterans from suicide without giving the vets any warning, without consulting their treating VA psychiatrists or me, their outside psychiatrist, have the gall to make defamatory claims of substandard treatment of veterans.
“In my opinion, the VA administrators who made the decision to pull the plug on these veterans’ treatments in such an unprofessional and dangerous manner should spend less time trying to deflect blame by libeling my team and me, and spend more time acknowledging and correcting their own sub-standard of care decisions.”
The VA statement also labels intramuscular injection as inferior to IV by saying it is not FDA approved nor is the safety of its long-term use supported by research.
That’s a problem because the same criticisms apply to IV ketamine, which the VA has used to treat vets and plans to use again for every patient failed by Spravato, a spokesperson said.
“The VA’s desperate attempt to deflect blame is transparent and utterly absurd,” Feifel said. “I can only shake my head and wonder what depths they will sink to next week to make us look like the culprits.”
It’s worth noting that the FDA approved ketamine for use as an anesthetic but hasn’t approved the drug in any form for use in depression.
Feifel explained that ketamine is old and off-patent, and no pharmaceutical company wants to shell out the millions of dollars necessary to bring the drug through FDA approval because there’s no financial incentive. With no patent, the company can’t own the rights to the drug and recoup those costs.
Spravato, however, was manufactured to be just different enough from ketamine that it could be patented for depression, but because it’s administered as a nasal spray, far less of the drug reaches the blood and brain.
There are 17 veterans at Kadima who have a limited number of ketamine injections left from prior VA authorizations. A San Diego VA spokesperson told inewsource in a June 15 email that by the end of September the agency will transition those vets back to the medical center for Spravato.
inewsource then asked why, if the VA was concerned veterans were receiving unsafe treatment at Kadima, it was allowing them to stay there for another three months. The spokesperson did not answer.
“The fact is,” Feifel wrote, “the ketamine treatments Kadima provides the veterans does deviate from industry standards, but not in the way the VA is suddenly alleging, rather these treatments are advanced well beyond the standard of care for depression, and that is precisely why they sent scores of vets to us year after year.”
OUTRAGE AMONG VETS BUILDING
Johan, the Air Force veteran, told inewsource he’s lived with a burden for decades — a rage that has cost him marriages and relationships with his children. He described it as an “anger and dark cloud that is above you that nobody should ever have to experience in their entire lives.”
Like others interviewed, Johan tried everything under VA care: drugs, electroconvulsive therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation. But his initial ketamine treatment in 2011 “was like a rebirth,” he said.
“My mind was refreshed. I could think. I had compassion. I could see colors. I wasn’t afraid to be around people.”
Then Johan was pulled from Kadima — “dumbfounded” and “frustrated” was how he described the news — and put on Spravato. It didn’t work, so the VA administered IV ketamine, which also didn’t help him. He said the VA doctors are not ketamine experts like Feifel, “who’s got his own private practice, who has bent over backwards, who knows and has studied this for 30-some odd years.”
“You would think that the VA would say … ‘Let us work with you and find out what’s working so we can coordinate this,’” Johan said.
But they have not, which he called “asinine.”
His anger is also back.
“I’m going to be the biggest thorn in the VA’s side,” Johan said. “I’m going to find the justice for all vets out there so that this crap doesn’t happen.”
Quiet and subdued, 58-year-old Marine veteran Hector Mejia sat on the couch across from Johan during the interview with inewsource.
The two met years ago as they both navigated the depression treatment circuit at the VA.
Mejia said he’s undergone about 100 electroconvulsive treatments, dozens of rounds of transcranial magnetic stimulation and has been prescribed as many as 20 medications a day for his depression. The only thing that worked was ketamine injections.
“It helped me get through the week,” Mejia said.
But he too was pulled from Kadima and went downhill fast. Recognizing this, Johan paid the $400 for an emergency ketamine injection for his friend at Kadima in June. Mejia says he’ll never forget the gesture.
“I appreciate him so much for doing that for me,” Mejia said.
Joel Andrews, a 45-year-old Army veteran who like Johan struggles with depression, anger and suicidal thoughts, has not been taking the transition well. He tried and failed with Spravato, and last week received IV ketamine at the San Diego VA. It didn’t work.
“I was just in a super bad mood afterwards, and it just trickled down. And you get that storm in your head and you can’t get your thoughts to slow down,” Andrews told inewsource.
He fired off an irate email to his VA psychiatrists that said, “I am back on that path of not wanting to be here anymore.”
The email continued, “I have hated myself since about the age of 9. Kadima was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel that way. Then you people came along and RUINED THAT! It’s not like I can get my healthcare anywhere else.”
Luckily, Andrews included Feifel in the email. The doctor rushed the Escondido veteran in for an emergency ketamine injection. By Sunday, Andrews wasn’t perfect but much improved.
“It would’ve gotten a whole lot worse if they hadn’t helped me out,” Andrews said.
Elected officials are now aware of what is happening at the La Jolla healthcare system.
Congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat whose district covers most of northern coastal San Diego County, told inewsource in a statement, “Any decision to change the health care treatment of our veterans should be based on the best medical practices, and the VA must have strong communication with their patients throughout that process.”
Local veterans, some of whom were succumbing to their depression after learning about the end of their treatment, are now going public to push for change.
Two vets profiled in inewsource’s original story have been interviewed by staff members of Congressman Scott Peters, D-San Diego.
The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs inquiry into ketamine also continues.
Stirling, from USC, said he expects the vets will get no relief unless Congress threatens to cut the San Diego VA’s budget. If that doesn’t happen, Stirling said, “the VA simply will not change.”
The San Diego VA has not responded to inewsource’s requests for comment about the inquiry.
It also continues to not answer questions challenging the accuracy of its previous statements.
inewsource photo and video journalist Zoë Meyers contributed to this report.
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Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
Managing Editor: Mark J. Rochester, markrochester@inewsource.org
Mark J. Rochester began as inewsource managing editor in April 2021, having served as editor in chief at Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Manhattan. He was previously senior news director for investigations at the Detroit Free Press. Both newsrooms, he notes, shared a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and their investigative journalism often received national recognition for exposing problems impacting communities of color.
His family looks forward to returning to California, having spent more than seven years in San Francisco where Rochester was a senior manager for the Associated Press. While with the news cooperative, he led computer-assisted reporting training efforts around the West, both inside and outside of AP, and conducted a widely used analysis of the $74 million in campaign contributions that went toward the California gay marriage ballot initiative in 2008. The AP analyzed who gave and why and then made the data available to member newspapers. The resulting series of stories based on the data was AP’s 2009 Pulitzer nomination for Local Reporting.
Rochester, who served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist in 2017, also has held senior leadership positions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Denver Post, Newsday and The Indianapolis Star. Rochester is vice president of Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc., the 6,000+ member international organization dedicated to improving investigative journalism. He also serves on the national advisory board of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington, D.C.
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Here are the services whose cookies you can find on inewsource.org:
- Sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter. These use the standard scripts provided by each company.
- Google Analytics, which we use to measure site traffic. Google Analytics gathers certain non-personally identifying information over time, such as your IP address, browser type, internet service provider, referring and exit pages, time stamp, and similar data. We also use Facebook Pixel to measure, optimize and build audiences for advertising campaigns served on Facebook. In particular it enables us to see how our users move between devices when accessing our website and Facebook, to ensure that our Facebook advertising is seen by our users most likely to be interested in such advertising by analyzing which content a user has viewed and interacted with on our website.
- Stripe, which allows us to accept donations through our website.
- Salesforce to manage newsletter subscriber, donor, and other identifiable user data.
- Mailchimp, to manage newsletter distributions. We collect your email address if you choose to subscribe to one of our email newsletters or email news alerts. Other optional information that you enter when subscribing – such as your first and last names or city are simply so that we can deliver more personalized email newsletters. We DO NOT sell, rent or market your information to any other parties. We retain your information only as long as necessary to provide your service. When we send emails, it collects some data about which users open the emails and which links are clicked. We use this information to optimize our email newsletters and, as aggregate information, to explain what percentage of our users open and interact with our newsletters.
Personal Data
We only collect personally identifiable information such as your name and email address when you sign up for a newsletter, donate to our organization, or otherwise submit it to us voluntarily. We do not share your personal data with any third parties other than some common service providers, whose products use your information to help us improve our site, deliver newsletters, or allow us to offer donation opportunities.
inewsource limits access to all user data for the purposes of newsletter, fundraising, and customer service only. User data is not sold to or otherwise shared with anyone not working with or for the inewsource.
You may unsubscribe or opt-out of our email and mail communications at any time by hitting the “unsubscribe” button in any email you receive from inewsource, or by emailing us at contact@inewsource.org or calling us at 619-594-5100.
Donor Information
The identities of all donors will be listed on our website. inewsource does not share, trade, sell, or otherwise release donors’ personal information to any third parties.
Refunds
If you encounter errors when donating on the website, please contact us at members@inewsource.org. For example, if you submit a donation for an incorrect amount or make a duplicate transaction please email us immediately so we can reverse the charges.
Cancellation of Recurring Donations
You can cancel your monthly recurring donations free of charge by notifying us at members@inewsource.org.
Links to Other Websites
Our site may contain links to documents, resources or other websites that we think may be of interest to you. We have no control over these other sites or their content. You should be aware when you leave our site for another, and remember that other sites are governed by their own user agreements and privacy policies, which should be available to you to read.
Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability
Although we take reasonable steps to prevent the introduction of viruses, worms, “Trojan Horses” or other destructive materials to our site, we do not guarantee or warrant that our site or materials that may be downloaded from our site are free from such destructive features. We are not liable for any damages or harm attributable to such features. We are not liable for any claim, loss or injust based on errors, omissions, interruptions or other inaccuracies on our site, nor for any claim, loss or injust that results from your use of this site or your breach of any provision of this User Agreement.
Contact Us
If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us at contact@inewsource.org or call us at 619-594-5100.