 I'm Elizabeth DePampe with DAV, and we're here in Washington, D.C., where DAV just released its special report, Women Veterans, The Journey to Mental Wellness. This is the third report of its kind that DAV's released focusing on women veterans, but it's the first to really drill down on mental health and suicide prevention, specifically for women veterans. I'm joined by Naomi Mathis. She's DAV's Assistant National Legislative Director, and she works very closely on this report. Naomi, tell us what this report is. Say comprehensive look on research of suicide prevention and women veterans and what the VA is doing and what more could be done. And tell us why we're talking specifically about women veterans. Certainly we know that we can talk about mental health for the whole veteran community. Why is it important to talk about women veterans? Well, first, this is the third report in a succession line of reports that DAV has done on women veterans. There was one in 2014, another one in 2018, but this is the first one that actually focuses on women veterans and mental health. And so it's super important because we've found that women veterans are just not being captured. The different factors, they have unique factors that when it comes to suicide prevention, reasons why, different reasons why they, let's say, hold a firearm or the way they store a firearm and biologically just they have different risk factors. And there's over 650,000 women veterans that are using the VA system currently. And that is a large number of women that really need their voices heard. I also want to point out, so we saw last year in the VA release, its latest suicide report, we saw an increase in suicides among the entire veteran community. But there was a 24% increase, 24.1% increase in suicides among women veterans, which I think is key to why we are here today. So the events that we just held, it included a presentation and a panel discussion. Was there anything that jumped out to you or that you really kind of took away from today's event? I will say that it was important that we had the researchers in the room. We had the VA researchers actually in the room telling us the back data on, you know, this is why we looked, or the back story on this is why we looked at this for women veterans. And so I would say Jennifer Alvarado, who is a Navy veteran, she told her story today in such a beautiful way and was very vulnerable and very open and was able to tie it into and put a face to why we have to do this and why this is so important. And I think that's really key, you know, women veterans sharing their voice and their stories so that we can better understand their experiences. In the report, which you can find at womenveterans.org, you'll find personal stories from women veterans. So Naomi, I know that DAV made over 50 policy and legislative recommendations to close some gaps in mental health care and suicide prevention for women veterans. What's next? How do you use this information and an act real change? Well, now we have to go forth, right? So we brought our findings to VA, but there's not just policy recommendations. There's legislative recommendations. There is legislation that was passed with the Debra Sampson Act and it was the most comprehensive piece of legislation for women veterans that's ever been passed. And so how do we build on that? What's happening now from things like Debra Sampson that are there gaps that, you know, need to be filled? And yes, in fact, we did find that there were gaps that needed to be filled. And so now we give them the solutions. We give them our policy and legislative recommendations. We bring it to Capitol Hill, which is obviously where we are today. And we let them know, like, hey, this is what's happening. This is what women veterans need and this is how this is the solution. This is not maybe the overall solution. But these are things that we can do to start moving the needle downward rather than the way it's been going, which is upward, unfortunately, sadly. So hopefully we can look forward to Debra Sampson 2.0 in the near future. Naomi, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for all the work that you did on this report. Thank you for watching. Again, you can go to womenveterans.org to read the full report. We're going to get out of the D.C. rain. Continue to follow DAV on social media for updates.