Suicidal thoughts plague returned veterans

Denial will not save their lives, marriages or relationships with their kids. Denial is just as deadly when families refuse to understand what PTSD is.

After years of writing on PTSD I had a hard time understanding why spouses of Afghanistan and Iraq troops did not ask questions or show any interest in learning what they needed to know. My answer came from a young wife. She said that while her husband was gone, she had enough to worry about. She had to take care of everything at home alone along with worrying about the car pulling up in the driveway to tell her that her husband was not coming home. She didn't want to have to worry about something that may not happen.

A wound by bullet or bomb in war, may or may not happen. The car with the Chaplain inside may or may not come. The tasks that have to be done and kids that need care, still all need to be taken care of even when they come home. The need to understand what PTSD is ahead of time goes a long way toward getting help right away instead of wondering what came home and blaming them for what is happening inside of them.

Families can either make their negative feelings stronger and feed the turmoil or they can ease their minds and help them heal. It all depends on what they know just as much as how much they care.

Why wait to regret what they did not do? A Vietnam veteran's wife called me the other day. They had been married for 40 years but with retirement, mild PTSD got worse. Recently she became aware of what PTSD is and now lives with the regret of the turmoil in her home and what it all did to her kids growing up. I told her that she did the best she could with what she knew and now has the chance to do better. I reminded her that when our husbands came home, there was nothing for us to help us help them. Then I told her that even knowing what PTSD was and knowing what to do as much as I knew what not to do, it was almost impossible to keep my family together. To hold a family together for 40 years knowing nothing is remarkable.

With all the information available today, knowing spouses want to remain uninformed is heartbreaking. Most of what they have ahead of them can be wonderful if they learn now just as much as if their spouse gets help now instead of years later, it can be a great future. The problem is time is being wasted while PTSD takes a stronger hold and negative emotions are fed.

If they learn now, love still lives later.

War’s other casualty: Suicidal thoughts plague returned veterans
BY BERNARD A. LUBELL
FEB 17, 2011
Suicide among veterans is not a simple discussion. With veterans making more than half the calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline since 2007, does the adage of the “ultimate sacrifice” need to be revisited?

More than 134,000 people made calls to the lifeline last year. Of those callers, 61 percent identified themselves as veterans, while 7 percent identified themselves as a friend or family of a veteran.

This means that nearly three-fourths of calls made to the lifeline were related to veterans’ issues.

“What we don’t really know is the relationship between the people who are really going to kill themselves and the population who calls,” said Dr. Dean Krahn, chief of the mental health service line at the VA in Madison, Wis.

The relationship may not be known, but the need is salient.

The Department of Veteran Affairs partnered with the lifeline in 2007 to provide these services for veterans. By dialing “1” after calling 1-800-273-TALK, veterans are routed to a lifeline that caters to their specific needs.

But the lifeline was only established in 2004, a few decades after Steve Nelson and others like him returned home from Vietnam.

For 35 years, Nelson never spoke about his war experiences. Instead, he found solace with drugs and alcohol to dull the memories magnified by his Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
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Suicidal thoughts plague returned veterans