Fort Campbell thinking outside the box reduces suicides

This is what can be done when the military stops thinking inside the box repeating the same mistakes over and over again. They have reached out to the community around them for ideas to respond to combat trauma.

The rest of the population of this country has been doing this for years but the military has found too many excuses to avoid what other humans need. Responding to traumatic events in the civilian world is a common sense approach to bring survivors back into the "normal" world outside of the event. For combat forces, they are carrying around too many of those events on their shoulders and this makes sense!

Suicides down at Fort Campbell
BY JAKE LOWARY • THE LEAF-CHRONICLE • May 14, 2010
A year ago, the mood at Fort Campbell became eerily somber — the reality of the mental condition of many of its soldiers was at the forefront of media reports and Department of Defense scrutiny.

The installation, home of the heralded 101st Airborne Division, was leading the way, and not in a category any of its leaders wanted to be in; Fort Campbell led the Army in suicides with 11 so far that year.

The news is better today. Fort Campbell has had just four suicides this year, according to Joe Varney, suicide prevention manager at Fort Campbell.

The installation has deployed more staff and more resources and made a concerted effort to defeat a stigma attached to the treatment of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. They credit those moves for the decrease.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the installation hosted about 200 civilian professionals in the behavioral health field to discuss Army suicides and to brainstorm ideas on how to better address the problem and treat soldiers.

"That was the whole idea — to bring in people from the behavioral health realm that are civilians," said Tiffany Shaw, suicide prevention specialist at Fort Campbell.

Shaw said officials tossed around many ideas, some of which have already been put into practice, such as in-theater treatment following a traumatic event like an improvised-explosive device blast or death, which Shaw said was "fairly new."

"It's something they're working on, and so far it's a good thing," she said.

Mandatory annual testing of soldiers also was suggested, but that has not proven as effective when tested, Shaw said.

"All of the behavioral health people spent all their time doing evaluations and not providing care," she said.

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Suicides down at Fort Campbell