I am an Air Force veteran. My son is currently serving on active duty. When a veteran or first responder walks through my door, I am not approaching their care from a textbook. I understand, at least in part, what it took to get here.
Let me be direct about something first. The problem veterans and first responders face when it comes to mental health care is not one thing. It is everything at once. The bureaucratic walls of the VA system. The culture that still equates seeking help with weakness. Years of being misdiagnosed, undermedicated, or handed a prescription and told good luck. And underneath all of that, a civilian mental health system that often does not understand what this population has actually been through.
That combination is why so many veterans and first responders reach me after years of doing everything right — therapy, medications, waiting lists — and still not being well. They followed the system. The system did not follow through.
Why I Built This Practice for This Population
It was not a business decision. When I look at who is underserved, who is falling through the gaps in Nebraska, and who deserves more than what the standard mental health system has offered them — the answer keeps pointing to the same people. Veterans. First responders. The ones carrying something that does not fit neatly into a fifty-minute therapy session or a standard antidepressant protocol.
My own service shaped how I think about duty, about showing up even when it is hard, and about what people deserve when they have given a significant part of themselves to something larger. That is what drove me to build a practice grounded in evidence, safety, and the kind of direct clinical honesty that this population responds to.
The One Thing That Changes the Conversation
When a veteran comes in skeptical about ketamine — and most of them are, because they have been let down before — the thing that tends to shift the conversation is this: ketamine does not require you to relive the trauma to work.
That matters more than I can overstate. Trauma-focused therapies are evidence-based and genuinely helpful for many people. But for a significant portion of veterans and first responders, the barrier to that work is the work itself. Re-exposure is too destabilizing. The dropout rates from trauma therapy in this population are well documented. Ketamine operates through a completely different mechanism — it does not ask you to go back. It works on the neurobiology of the brain directly, promoting neuroplasticity and interrupting the entrenched neural patterns that keep the nervous system locked in a trauma response. You do not have to tell me the story to start getting better.
What the Research Shows
A 2024 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry (Liu et al.) synthesized 11 studies and 22 independent samples on ketamine specifically in military populations. The finding was significant — large, clinically meaningful reductions in PTSD, depression, and chronic pain outcomes, across different administration routes, dosing protocols, and both active-duty and veteran groups. A 2021 randomized controlled trial (Feder et al., American Journal of Psychiatry) found that 67% of patients receiving repeated IV ketamine infusions for chronic PTSD were classified as treatment responders — compared to 20% on placebo. Recent VA data from the San Diego Healthcare System found that ketamine and esketamine produced significant reductions in both depression and PTSD symptom scores across 119 veterans.
The evidence is not theoretical. It is real, it is peer-reviewed, and it is strong enough that the VA itself has been expanding ketamine programs nationally. As of 2024, more than two dozen VA medical centers have adopted ketamine protocols. Nebraska veterans have limited VA access to these treatments. That gap is part of why Parker Neuroscience exists.
Why Nebraska Specifically Has a Problem
It is not one thing. The VA system was not designed to move at the pace this population needs. Most civilian providers in Nebraska do not understand the military experience and cannot offer these treatments anyway. And the private ketamine market in Nebraska is thin — with significant variation in clinical standards between providers. The combination of those three gaps means that veterans and first responders in this state are often left with nothing that actually fits their situation.
Parker Neuroscience is not the VA, and it is not a ketamine lounge. It is a medically rigorous, REMS-certified, DNP-led interventional psychiatry practice that understands both the clinical picture and the human one.
Who I Built This For
The patients I built this practice for are the ones who have not given up despite having every reason to. The ones who are skeptical because they have been let down, but still made the appointment anyway. The ones who want someone to be straight with them — not sell them something, not manage them, not run them through a protocol and send them home. People who have spent years doing everything right and are still not well, and are willing to ask whether there is something they have not tried yet.
If that is you — or someone you know — the answer to that question is yes. There is something you have not tried yet. And it does not require you to go back through everything that broke you to get there.
References
1. Liu JJW, Ein N, Gervasio J, et al. Ketamine in the effective management of chronic pain, depression, and PTSD for Veterans. Front Psychiatry. 2024;15:1338581.
2. Feder A, Costi S, Rutter SB, et al. A randomized controlled trial of repeated ketamine administration for chronic PTSD. Am J Psychiatry. 2021;178(2):193–202.
3. Zhang S, Afshar H, Colvonen PJ, et al. Impact of medical comorbidities on ketamine and esketamine treatment effectiveness for PTSD and depression: VA San Diego. CNS Drugs. 2025;39(6):609–619.
4. Abdallah CG, Roache JD, et al. Dose-related effects of ketamine for PTSD in veterans and active duty military. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2022;47:1574–1581.