(light music) - [Bill] Williamston, population 3,820 miles east of Lansing, Kent Hall, Vietnam vet and community leader has another meeting tonight.

- [Kent] How you doing?

- Good, how are you?

- [Bill] He served on city council, now he chairs the Parks and Rec Committee.

- Motion to excuse McGee and Wolf.

- Kent nominated me for mayor in 2016, and the friendship has blossomed ever since.

- You've cut through the bureaucracy sometimes to make good happen.

It's for the betterment of the community.

- The two most important days of your life is the day you were born and the day you figure out why.

I figured out my why, and that's what I'm doing, and it feels good.

- [Bill] Hall's why, helping veterans cope with post-traumatic stress.

His group, Honor For All, led by another Vietnam vet, Tom Tom Mahany.

Now, Hall's story starts in Linden, near Flint, high school class president, top athlete, a champion pole vaulter.

It was the 1960s, in college, he had a shoulder injury that needed surgery.

- I lost my deferment by dropping out for one semester.

They snatched me right away.

- [Bill] In the army, he spent time in Europe.

The back end of his tour?

Vietnam.

- I never saw so many mortars and explosives go out.

It was like it was fire all around.

- [Bill] Post-traumatic stress, Hall didn't know he had it.

The term didn't even exist yet.

In Linden, he finished college, work, became a city councilman, an upstanding citizen.

So everyone thought.

- I was about 40 years old when I just couldn't take it anymore.

I mean, I had three beautiful kids, I had a beautiful wife, and I didn't wanna live anymore.

So I started suicide by cop.

- [Bill] Hall made the news in 1986.

They called him the "jogging bandit," former star athlete turned bank robber.

- I robbed 13 banks with a toy gun, but they called me the jogging bandit 'cause I didn't run away.

I just, come on and catch me.

Well, the first one was right in Grand Blanc, and the second one might've been Grand Blanc.

They were all Michigan national banks until the one in Ohio.

- [Bill] Michigan National?

Hall didn't like them.

- They gave me a hassle about a car loan.

(Kent laughing) - [Bill] For that, six and a half years in federal prison.

- I was an elder in the church.

I was a councilman in the City of Linden.

In fact, the night before my arrest, I was re-ordained as an elder in the Presbyterian church there.

- [Bill] Hall rebuilt his life, eventually moving to Williamston.

Hall's Honor for All partner Tom Mahany, he's got a story too.

He lives in Royal Oak, a stone mason, artist.

As a child, destined for the U.S. Military Academy.

But Mahany was conflicted about Vietnam when he was a cadet at West Point.

- I was reassigned to the infantry when I was released from West Point, and I was released from West Point because I had different views of what Vietnam was and what we should be doing about it.

And that was in '68.

I spent the next year and a half in the Army.

- [Bill] When Mahany got back, he headed to Washington.

Unhappy with the U.S. taking the war to Cambodia, he joined another hunger striker at the capital.

He'd hold other hunger strikes by himself, more recently against the stop-loss policy during Iraq and Afghanistan, forcing soldiers to keep serving long past their scheduled release dates.

And he spoke about the high suicide rates among veterans.

- Suicides keep going.

The battle stops, but the suicide keeps going.

- [Bill] It's estimated as many as 22 veterans will kill themselves each day.

- Your brother-in-law, right?

Was- - Well, yeah.

My brother-in-law.

He committed suicide back in the '80s.

- But that was part of your motivation too, right?

- Yeah, well, I saw what it did to my sister and her two little boys.

- So how long were you actually on that hunger strike?

- 29 days.

- [Bill] Mahany in Washington, a one-man lobbyist for veterans mental health.

- I take 'em a new letter every day.

Tried to get somebody to listen, and it was finally Karl Evans office that listened.

- See, I've never heard this story before.

- No.

- Don't really get into each other's personal.

- Talk about what's gonna happen instead of what happened.

- [Kent] Yeah.

- 'Cause most of what happened wasn't that good.

- This is the Honor for All trail, and it's all been approved by City Council, the Parks Commission, and the Planning Commission.

- These are tulips.

- These are tulips?

- These are tulips, and these are- - [Bill] Big plans.

More work needed at Williamson's Memorial Park on the banks of the Red Cedar River, with a section dedicated to Veterans.

Hope is someday, a national monument too.

- [Bill] But that's what this park is all about.

You gotta work something out.

You can come here and work it out, or at least work on working it out.

- [Bill] Still a bigger project, dealing with that term PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, medical advisor for Honor For All, he ran Michigan's Department of Mental Health and helped define PTSD as a diagnostic term in 1980.

- What we based it on, it had a lot to do with the Vietnam War.

It also had a lot to do with women and what women were very concerned about at the time.

- [Bill] Amongst them, second wave feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem who tied sexual assault and domestic violence to traumatic stress.

- I saw it as the two genders coming together to define something worthy of putting, not just in the psychiatric dictionary, but the general medical dictionary.

- [Bill] The mission, change the term PTSD to PTSI, post-traumatic stress injury, and get that in the diagnostic manual, the DSM.

So all can know the problem is not their fault.

It's an injury to be treated like any other injury, as you would, say, a broken leg.

- Well, if I admit to having post traumatic stress disorder, I'm disordered, so I'm not gonna admit it.

And if I'm not gonna admit it, then I'm not gonna get treatment for it.

This is a file containing all the resolutions from all the states, starting back in 2014.

- [Bill] PTSI, Mahany has been working on this for 11 years, collecting resolutions from Michigan, then 46 other states and both chambers of Congress, - And it's going to lessen their guilt, and it's gonna cut down on suicides.

Okay, that's it for the crocus.

- [Bill] Tom Mahany, Dr. Frank Ochberg, and Kent Hall have helped change some minds, but they wanna change a lot more.

- So it's getting there, but it's not getting there quickly enough.

So I wanna show you my graphic here.

PTSI, not PTSD.

- [Bill] In Chicago, Dr. Eugene Lipov treats traumatic stress.

He shows the trauma is visible in brain scans and says he can prove the name change can help.

- So I did a survey, which I published in 2023, and presented the American Psychiatric Association, the body that controls the naming.

Turns out, yes, if you change the name, the stigma will get better.

- I think now we have the evidence to change it.

I think when we do change it, there will be a celebration that we've done the right thing.

- [Bill] The American Psychiatric Association confirms the PTSI proposal is now under initial evaluation by the DSM Steering Committee.

Perhaps the change is coming soon, driven in part by a little non-profit in Williamston, Michigan.

- We have a wall of honor there, and all the people on the wall of honor died in action, and we're here to honor them today.

But there's another bunch of people that might have died years later, even at their own hands possibly.

And those are the victims of post-traumatic stress issue, and they deserve honor.

It's as though that sniper's bullet took years or months or whatever to actually strike, and the hell they went through before they got there.