VA doesn't know much about suicides, and other things

You would think that the VA, who claim world class care, the best medical care in the country, would be a bit more interested in facts and data, but then you would have to think they would be interested in them in the first place. You'd also have to think that they would want to live up to the claims they make and take care of all the lives placed into their hands enough to have tracked all of this from the start. There are only two possibilities here. Either they didn't want to know or they knew and just hid the data. Either way it's a slap in the face to all veterans who served this nation since the Revolutionary War.

V.A. says it doesn't know much about why veterans commit suicide

5/9/2008 9:15:01 PM

McClatchy-Tribune

WASHINGTON -- Members of Congress who questioned Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake and his top aides about suicides among veterans accused them of hiding information about the issue.

The officials' response was simple, but hardly comforting: The VA wasn't covering up the truth, they said, because it didn't know the truth.

Last week's hearing of the House Veterans Affairs Committee was aimed at finding out whether service members who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are killing themselves in large numbers.

But where one might expect precise, up-to-date statistics there instead are incomplete figures with a decided time lag.

Here is some of what is known, according to the most recent government figures:

-- An estimated 18 veterans kill themselves each day, or almost 6,600 a year; that number includes all veterans.

-- Almost three-quarters of them had not been receiving care from VA facilities.

-- Only 144 veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan committed suicide over a four-year period, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

One major problem with the data is that it stops in 2005 -- thus vastly understating the number of suicides of Iraq or Afghanistan veterans. The Iraq war didn't start until 2003, and relatively few combat troops had left the military by 2005. In addition, the Iraqi insurgency grew increasingly violent in recent years.

And the risk factors for post-traumatic stress disorder, which can lead to depression and suicide, have increased, largely because of multiple deployments.

A rise in suicides among Iraq or Afghanistan veterans is shown by figures obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from internal government e-mails, with the 144 suicides consisting of 7 in 2002, 21 in 2003, 48 in 2004 and 68 in 2005.

"I'm suspicious that we're not getting all the statistics," says Matthew Cary, president of Veterans & Military Families for Progress. "I don't understand why we don't have the most recent data."
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