Seven years of troops being told PTSD and Suicides is your fault

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 10, 2014

Last year David Wood of Huffington Post interviewed General Ray Odierno on military suicides. The interview told more about why they were committing suicide and it had more to do with his attitude than anything else. Odierno blamed the troops for being mentally weak and not having supportive families.

"First, inherently what we do is stressful. Why do I think some people are able to deal with stress differently than others? There are a lot of different factors. Some of it is just personal make-up. Intestinal fortitude. Mental toughness that ensures that people are able to deal with stressful situations.

But it also has to do with where you come from. I came from a loving family, one who gave lots of positive reinforcement, who built up psychologically who I was, who I am, what I might want to do. It built confidence in myself, and I believe that enables you to better deal with stress. It enables you to cope more easily than maybe some other people.

Where did he get such an irrational idea? Same place most military leaders did.

Seven years ago today I started Wounded Times keeping a promise to a Marine serving in Iraq. He liked reading my other site because of PTSD but didn't like political posts. Most people don't like politics and I have kept my promise to him ever since then. I don't like politicians. Easy to see if you read Wounded Times with any regularity. None of them live up to what they promise they will do if they get elected. I told the Marine the only time he'd read about a politician was when they did something for or to veterans.

I've been thinking a lot about the day this started. After the post about the new site, it was followed by a post on a Veterans Center healing invisible wounds. East Valley Tribune reported it out of Arizona.

For Mike Saye and Daryl Cox, it was the Iraq War that unearthed the horrors of combat. The Vietnam veterans struggled for nearly 30 years with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but never sought help until young Americans started fighting, and dying, in the Middle East.

They were gathered Thursday at a new Veterans Readjustment Center near Fiesta Mall in Mesa, getting help for their own demons and hoping to give younger veterans the benefit of their experience.

“It triggered everything in me. I started dreaming about it again,” Saye, of Mesa, said of the Iraq War.

“I was a candidate for PTSD for years and years, but I thought I could handle it,” he said, even as he struggled through four marriages and some 30 jobs.

“But I can’t, and they can’t either. I don’t want them to wait as long as I did to get help.”

Though a trickle of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are finding their way to the new center, team leader Patrick Ryan knows many more are out there.

“We’re certainly trying to do outreach, but we’d like to see more of them,” Ryan said. “The stigma is not what it used to be, but it’s still there.”

Over the years far too many veterans did not get the care they needed to heal. They committed suicide. The number of suicides among veterans increased dramatically by 2007. A few days after Wounded Times began, I released a post I had done on my older blog Why isn't the press on suicide watch? The press counted, as well as they could, the number of suicides within the military however, never seemed to link veterans committing suicide to those numbers. After all, veterans were in fact created by the military but they were no longer Department of Defense's problem.

Tracking news reports across the country has been heartbreaking. Major national news sources ignored most of these suicides just as much as they ignored veterans facing off with police and SWAT Teams after families called for to get the veteran help. The vast majority ended with the veteran being killed instead of helped.

The other thing the national news reporters ignored was as funds to prevent suicides increased to billions a year, suicides increased as well. The reason became clear in 2009 as the Army announced they would be using a program called "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness."

By 2009, it was clear that if they pushed this program suicides would go up.

If you promote this program the way Battlemind was promoted, count on the numbers of suicides and attempted suicides to go up instead of down. It's just one more deadly mistake after another and just as dangerous as sending them into Iraq without the armor needed to protect them.

It was not a guess on my part. It was already proven when numbers increased after the other failed attempt called "Battlemind" leaving the troops blaming themselves for being mentally weak and not training right. All the military had to do was actually talk to these men and women to discover these attempts were making it worse than it had to be for them.

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness was a research project to give school aged kids a better sense of self worth. It was still in the research stage when it was sold to the Department of Defense as training to prevent PTSD and then decrease suicides. It was pushed throughout the military afterwards with absolutely no proof of the validity of the claims made by the creator, Martin Seligman.

Army Times reported on a publication from Coalition for Ethical Psychology titled "Dark Side of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness"

Worse, say members of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, these programs could undermine coping mechanisms developed by troops who already successfully handle stress.

Created in 2008 to address alarming trends in soldier behavior, such as rising suicides, alcohol and drug abuse, and behavioral health problems, CSF is based on the teachings of Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor and proponent of positive psychology. He says an optimistic outlook can affect all aspects of life and ward off anxiety and depression.

The training, and the program's annual measurement test, the Global Assessment Tool, is mandatory for all soldiers. Since 2009, 8,000 officers and enlisted personnel have attended master resilience courses. They in turn teach CSF at the unit level.

Eidelson and psychologist Stephen Soldz said they believe the Army's conclusions of success are "deeply flawed" because they are based solely on self-assessment and do not include validated measures of the program's effects on post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, suicides or psychological disorders.

The Army said its next report, due later this year, will examine the impact of CSF on these behaviors.

"I can understand the desire for a primary prevention program, but the fact that the suicide rate is up this year, after this program has been in place for a while, does suggest it's not producing any miracles," Soldz said.

We were all proven right years later when RAND Corp took a look at these "programs" discovering they did not fit with military culture and people cannot be taught to be resilient.

Most programs have been implemented before evidence of their effectiveness has been established. Programs often are modified for each client or context, making it difficult to design studies that will provide evidence of effectiveness for all military populations and situations. New scientific studies have recently been funded and are in the planning or initial data collection stages, but, as with most quasi-experimental or controlled studies, it will be a number of years before evidence of their effectiveness is fully established. As these studies with evaluative data progress, they should be encouraged to publish their results.

Conduct More Rigorous Program Evaluation
Although there are many programs available to the military and civilian communities, there is very little empirical evidence that these programs effectively build resilience.

Similarly, there are a number of factors related to resilience, but there is almost no evidence that resilience can be taught or produced. Results from both the literature review and the program review echo the need for more program evaluation, as identified as one of the missions of the DCoE. As noted, only 11 documents in the literature review are based on RCT evaluation design, and only five of the programs reviewed have formally evaluated program success, yet programs are often rolled out before evidence of their effectiveness has been established and are modified for each client or context, making it difficult to provide evidence for effectiveness across populations and situations.

Other evidence has proven RAND Corp and other experts right but what we just ended up with is the American Psychological Association releasing another report that blames the troops for having "pre-existing mental health problems.

Suicide risk among soldiers may be rooted in their past
USA TODAY
Sharon Jayson
August 9, 2014

Experiencing child abuse, being sexually victimized and exhibiting suicidal behavior before enlisting are significant risk factors for suicide, according to recent studies from the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah.

WASHINGTON — The high suicide rates among military veterans and current servicemembers may be more likely a result of past traumatic experiences rather than combat and multiple deployments, suggest new findings presented Saturday at the American Psychological Association's annual convention.

Experiencing child abuse, being sexually victimized and exhibiting suicidal behavior before enlisting are significant risk factors for suicide, according to recent studies from the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah.

Findings show that traumatic experiences before military service make current and former military personnel more vulnerable to suicidal behavior.

"Combat exposure and deployment at times may be a risk factor, but it's relatively low in comparison to these other demographic characteristics. That war causes an extreme amount of distress, which leads to suicide -- I believe that's questionable, given some of the results that we have," Griffith says.
read more here

They want to blame the troops still no matter how much evidence has come out over the years. While blaming the troops, they ignore all they have done to "prevent" military suicides has failed. They ignore the fact that their mental health evaluations prior to enlistments must have failed if they did not discover mental health issues they now claim to be factors.

If their testing and training have failed, there are no excuses left and blaming the troops feeds the stigma preventing them from seeking help to heal.

Seven years of posting their stories has proven beyond a doubt the military refuses to accept responsibility for what they have done to the men and women they command.