Note: Real names have been withheld. All names mentioned are pseudonyms.
Some veterans and clinicians are looking for reasons to hope beyond “coping,” and outcomes of care like Tracy Cassity’s are part of that search—especially as the VA continues to face a stubborn suicide crisis.
The Weight Veterans Carry
Public VA reporting and advocacy groups have long documented that thousands of veterans die by suicide each year, a reality that keeps pressure on the agency’s prevention efforts and on the broader mental-health system meant to support military families. In that atmosphere, it’s understandable that any approach promising faster relief would feel like a lifeline—particularly for people who have spent years cycling through medications, groups, and repeated retellings of the same difficulties with worsening days.
The debate is not only about methods; it’s also about what counts as “whole person” care. Secular (meaning no spiritual or religious basis) treatments, diagnoses, and ”best practices” are universally mandated, and don’t meet them where they are with whatever moral, spiritual, or simply unidentifiable internal conflict, pain, and injury. Decades of evidence-based treatments that correlate with endless therapy, irrespective of the clinical approach, are noted.
But veterans who understand how bias benefits the institution might be. “Secularism can’t reinvent faith or science,” he observes. “It’s corporate gamesmanship. VA administrators deploying secular bias profit by looking like heroes handling a difficult job, clientele, and diagnoses… but if the spirit is injured as much as the body, is it all that scientific? Whether at the VA or the local mental health center, is a dangerously biased notion that a client’s faith is irrelevant to recovery science, or a corporate ploy to justify a budget?
There’s Promise In Remission
Cassity, a therapist and the author of Extraordinary Mental Wellness, points out that mental health science has grown accustomed to managing symptoms rather than expecting subclinical resolution. Remission to zero symptoms—not just improvement—is the outcome that matters most, and Cassity’s work demonstrates that standard. “Patrick Poor, a licensed marriage and family therapist who developed Trauma Conversion Therapy (TCT) over 32 years, built his practice on taking the clients no one else was able to help or heal.
That’s worth considering,” Cassity says. He describes TCT as a spiritually friendly process that quietly addresses “old pain” without requiring clients to discuss values, faith, or review traumatic events. Training materials describe the method as short-term, emphasizing internal capacity to self-heal, rather than rehearsing the story of what happened. The most exciting observations circulating about TCT—especially high remission rates across diagnoses—come from a three-year study of Cassity’s client records.
Each has self-reported Outcome Questionnaire Analysis (OQ) outcomes-of-care scores, a widely respected measure supported by more than 500 empirical validation studies. Cassity’s clients are nearly all “unusually rapid” remissions. Each client was measured against all OQs, diagnoses, and all populations in a worldwide mental health system between 2020 and 2023. “There were more remissions than have ever been recorded for any one category, let alone all of them.”
A Veteran’s Story Of Change
In one of hundreds of accounts, “Randy,” a veteran, returned from Afghanistan with complex PTSD and migraines, to explosive family relationships, a disintegrating marriage, and what he believed was permanent psychological damage. He’d spent long stretches in group therapy—years processing, remembering, trying to change, trying to endure—yet still felt trapped in a loop of flashbacks and dread.
“Randy’s experience with TCT was different in both pace and posture,” Cassity says. “No discussion, no ‘expert’ interpretations, only each individual’s innate capacity to self-heal, removing old pain without revisiting it in detail. Randy’s distress score dropped sharply in each of several sessions, and by the fourth, he was no longer experiencing the symptoms that had seemed to define his life, struggling marriage, and family. Randy resolved PTSD, family, and marriage, and was symptom-free years later, calling back only for a recommendation on where to study, with every intention of learning to help other veterans learn TCT.”
Where Hope Might Lead Next
If the last decade has taught mental health anything, it may be that people rarely change unwillingly or while still in pain. Reviews of both religiously accommodated and secular therapy suggest minimal benefits for patients or therapists who are forced into uniform behavioral orthodoxy. Secular bias in mental illness is not a topic in easily accessible public health literature, nor simple to identify, but it is addressed aptly in Cassity’s book Extraordinary Mental Wellness: A Proven Pathway Out of Darkness and Despair, Trauma Conversion Therapy Remission Outcomes.
“Clinical terms are intentionally difficult to grasp. Jaded professionalism overwhelms evidence-based populations and theories alike,” he notes. “Pain is an internal warning system that says something is amiss. Removing the sliver initiates healing from within. Change the pain, and everything changes.” That gap doesn’t automatically mean either secular bias or spiritual nature constitutes genuine science or genuine faith; it does mean readers should consider which authority to follow, rather than blindly following along.
For readers drawn to Cassity and Poor’s work, the most encouraging takeaway may not be a guarantee, but instead permission to invite the professionals to bring anything that produces better outcomes to the table. “Difficult to treat”, “treatment-resistant”, or “malingering”, as widely used in settings like the VA,” Cassity says, “are more often a result of a client having believed, tried, and failed to make miserably poor therapy effective. It’s easy to fall into cynicism with experts. It’s a point where one’s spirit pushes back in dismay and distress against the subversion of truth, not a verdict on a person’s capacity to heal. For genuine healing or healers to emerge, biased mental health doctrine must be healed.
