It doesn't matter that I've been taking all of this very seriously before a lot of these people were out of high school. 27 years of my life have been fully invested in finding out what can be done to help veterans heal from what we sent them to do. I've read just about every clinical book but above that, hundreds of emails over the years, talking to more veterans face to face than I can remember and living with it 24/7. I watched as it changed my husband and nearly killed him. I watched and fought to keep him alive and hold my family together. Then I wanted to do whatever I could so that no other family had to feel the way I did, totally alone.
Over the years, experts made mistakes, just as I did in my marriage. Over the years, researchers made tremendous gains, just as I did in my marriage. Now I sit here wondering what good any of this did when we are still losing more and more servicemen and women because of combat instead of during it.
I read about how many veterans called the suicide prevention line and how many they proudly say they saved, but watch as the numbers in need go up with no one understanding what this means. They still fail to realize that with the number of veterans reaching the point where suicide seems to be their only option, they have a growing problem they are no where close to fixing.
I read about all the efforts the DOD and the VA are making trying to fix the problem when they come up with programs they fail to understand has added to the problem instead of fixing it. How can they be so blind when the numbers keep going up? If these programs worked, the numbers would go down and not up! While it's great they are no longer dismissing it, when they do more harm than good, it's time for them to start thinking like a human instead but they have also failed to understand the cause of PTSD, why it strikes some but avoids others anymore than they have managed to understand there are different levels of PTSD, different types of it due to different events, dormant PTSD, mild PTSD, full blown PTSD, secondary stressors and secondary PTSD.
While I read so much about what they claim they are doing, I have to read something like this screaming they don't know what they're doing!
Fort Hood, home to III Corps headquarters, had three suicides in January, and the Army as a whole reported 27.
Fort Hood, Army still seeing suicide problem
By Sig Christenson - Express-News Fort Hood had more suicides in January than any other installation as the Army searched for solutions to a baffling mystery.
Despite a series of programs designed to tackle the problem at the post and throughout the Army, the service's January suicide mark still came close to matching the one from the same month last year — 29.
Three of the 27 suicides reported Wednesday occurred on Fort Hood, which has sent soldiers to combat since the 2003 Iraq invasion.
The chief of the Army Suicide Prevention Task Force talked of the service's efforts to counter the problem rather than discussing the latest numbers, which picked up where a grim 2009 left off.
“We've made significant changes in our health promotion, risk reduction, and suicide prevention programs, policies and initiatives,” Col. Christopher Philbrick said. “Now in 2010, we're going to move from a floodlight to a laser light — identifying our most effective programs, so we can target and reinforce what's working and fix what isn't.”
Last year was the worst for suicides among active-duty soldiers since the Army began tracking those deaths in 1980, with 160 GIs killing themselves at home and in the war zone. That was up from 140 in 2008.read more here
I attend a lot of training conferences, hearing from experts and wonder why they are not in charge of most of the programs. Then I hear other experts, wondering how they could be considered "expert" in any of this as they are clearly juvenilely "educated" not ready to treat anyone but have a degree because they seemed to have understood what they read in a book.
Major Hasan is a great example of this. He was trained and in position to treat the soldiers but clearly no one really trusted his ability to treat them properly. What resulted was not as obvious as the fact he decided to obliterate the lives of 13 soldiers and wound many others. We don't know how many he treated as a "psychologist" or how much harm he did intentionally or otherwise. Has anyone really looked at what his actions spawned? He took away the Fort Hood soldiers last safe place where their families lived, shopped, kids went to school and they walked around unarmed. This also ended up putting doubt into every solider's mind about the security on their own bases as well as what the hell was the military thinking promoting someone like Hasan and putting him in position to do what he did.
While the cause of PTSD is always and only traumatic events, there are many types of events. They cannot assume they can treat PTSD in a witness the same way they can treat someone participating in the event like the one pulling the trigger. They cannot treat someone with PTSD after they lose a limb the same way they treat someone after they have obliterated a family of civilians that ended up getting way too close to a convoy. They wouldn't treat a POW the same as they would treat a guard after a riot. Yet they end up doing just that because the military does not think like humans, they think like Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, they think like Sailors.
This is why their programs like Battlemind do not work! They forgot how the human would hear the message at the same time they were being trained on how to be able to kill well.
Ask the DOD why they think some end up wounded by PTSD and you'll see them scratching their heads. Ask them what makes others walk away getting "over it" while others end up being eaten up by it and they'll stumble for excuses. So we get to read repeated versions of what they are doing at the same time we see clearly they are not doing it right because the numbers keep going up. But what do I know? I'm not a college trained "expert," in this. I've just been doing it over half my life while I wait for them to figure out what life has taught me.
The experts they need to be listening to are the people taking all of this very personally because someone in their life has been living with it. The best therapists have PTSD but they are not listened to. It's time for the DOD and the VA to think outside of the box since they've already used everything in it and none of it has worked.
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