Tony Messenger | Post-Dispatch
Metro columnist
Ray King and Blake Richardson are both veterans, and both battle post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
In June, I wrote about King winning his lawsuit against his former employer, which failed to make proper accommodations for his PTSD.
The column ended with this open-ended question from King: “How do we get help to remove the monsters in our head?â€
Richardson believes he has an answer. It’s a treatment he started after years of counseling and drugs didn’t do enough for him. It’s called hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatment.
Richardson is part of a growing chorus of veterans asking the Veterans Administration and various states to approve and fund the treatment for PTSD. The treatment pumps oxygen into a pressurized chamber, which patients inhale through a mask or hood. Sessions can last as long as a couple of hours. The concentrated oxygen is thought to help treat brain tissue.
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In the last session of the Missouri Legislature, Richardson and the nonprofit he founded, , pushed to get a bill passed establishing a fund under the Missouri Veterans Commission to potentially help cover hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatments. The bill didn’t identify a source of money — Richardson hopes that comes later — but it’s part of a national strategy to build support for the idea. The bill requires the commission to create an annual report with data about the treatment and its effectiveness.
A national nonprofit called is also advocating for more support for the treatment, with hopes that it can reduce veteran suicides. There were about 6,400 veteran suicides across the nation in 2022, the last full year for which the VA has posted statistics. Of those, 171 were in Missouri, which has than the national average.
“It needs to be made accessible,†Richardson says of the treatment. “It’s a moral obligation to take care of our veterans.â€
Richardson, who lives in Kansas, served in the Marine Corps from 2004 to 2009. He was a mechanic and also did some work as a military policeman in Iraq, where he was deployed twice, in 2005 and 2007. He took multiple blows to the head and survived a rocket-propelled-grenade attack.
“All that stuff adds up,†Richardson said. “I was diagnosed upon leaving the service.â€
Richardson tried all the PTSD therapies offered by the VA, but he continued to have trouble sleeping and he couldn’t retain information when he read. The nonprofit Richardson founded had helped an Army Ranger veteran get treatment at the in Kansas City. After the veteran told Richardson the oxygen chamber treatments were helping him, Richardson gave it a try.
“I started sleeping again. It was unbelievable,†he said. “It was completely life-changing. I’m not a hermit like I used to be.â€
That word — hermit — is one that several veterans with PTSD have used with me before, including King, who mostly stays to himself at his farm in Illinois. Many veterans with PTSD find it hard to be in crowds because of various triggers, such as loud noises, or to vary from routine, which can aggravate their symptoms.
For Richardson and other veterans, hyperbaric oxygen was the PTSD treatment that made the most difference.
Richardson points to studies that suggest the treatment is successful in at least 60 percent of patients. The VA is more suspect of the data, and the FDA hasn’t yet approved the treatment for PTSD. But some doctors have been prescribing it as an “off-label†treatment, in the same way that popular drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, first prescribed as a Type 2 diabetes treatments, were later approved as weight-loss drugs.
U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy, a Republican from North Carolina, has sponsored a bill to create a VA pilot project to study the effectiveness of hyperbaric oxygen treatment. The bipartisan bill in May.
Richardson hopes Missouri’s new bill, even without funding, will get the attention of veterans and help build momentum for the VA to pay for treatments. Missouri is the 13th state to pass a bill creating a fund for the treatment, though only about half the states have taken the second step of actually providing money.
“You’d think this would be more accessible,†Richardson said of the treatment that he believes changed his life. “It’s not a cure-all, but for many veterans, it works. It heals.â€
Dogs 4 Valor, operated through an organization called The Battle Within, helps retired veterans and first responders in the Kansas City area work with their service dogs to help manage depression.
