$145 million program made up of repeated failures

This has failed and will keep failing as long as they refuse to acknowledge they have wasted billions of dollars since PTSD began to be studied in the 70's. They keep repeating the same mistakes and we keep burying combat veterans because they keep committing suicide. They keep telling soldiers they can "train their brains" to be "resilient" without one single clue what that means to them. It means if they end up with PTSD it is their fault because they didn't train right and are in fact weak. They are not told that they were already mentally tough as well as physically tough to even begin to think about being in the military. They were mentally tough when they decided to put themselves in harms way and risk their lives for this country. PTSD cannot be "prevented" by telling them their minds were weak.

This article talks about the deaths last month to suicide. 32 in the Army, but there were also 4 Marines with another 17 attempting it. These programs have been in "business" for a long time and the results are always the same, more deaths. The numbers wouldn't be going up and there is nothing they can say to explain that one away with all the money they spent to "prevent" it and "train brains" as if they can get them to ignore everything else going on and train their brains to want to live. They survived combat for Heaven's sake! It's not as if they really wanted to die in the first place. So why is it they want to die after? The DOD and the VA still don't get it.

The resulting initiative, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, is a $145 million program made up of psychological fitness testing designed to measure emotional, familial, social and spiritual fitness and strengths; courses on post-traumatic growth; and a critical 10-day master resiliency training under which the Army's 40,000 drill sergeants -- effectively the Army's teachers -- are trained to help soldiers deal with high levels of sustained, everyday stress.

There is nothing to be optimistic about when they are told it is THEIR fault.
After trauma, teaching hope
By Amanda Enayati, Special to CNN
August 19, 2011
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Human response to extreme stress and adversity is bell-shaped, expert says
The vast majority of people are resilient -- they bounce back after a few months
Optimists do much better in terms of post-traumatic stress reaction than pessimists

Editor's note: Freelance writer Amanda Enayati contributes regularly to CNNHealth.com.

(CNN) -- The number of young men and women from the U.S. Army who committed suicide last month was so devastatingly high that it set a dismal new record.

About two-thirds of the 32 dead were active-duty soldiers; the rest were reservists. And like all riptides of tragedy, news of the deaths of bright young people with lives of promise stretched out before them has thrown many off balance.

"People think of us in the Army as these super-beings in uniform. But they forget that we are a direct reflection of American society," said Maj. Juanita Chang. "And everything you have going on in society -- good and bad -- you are going to have those in the Army, too. Like everyone else, we are black and brown and white. We are worried about the economy, politics and jobs crisis. And sometimes we have problems coping, like everyone else.
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Senator slams DoD on suicide prevention efforts
By Andrew Tilghman - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Aug 18, 2011 17:15:00 EDT
It’s been a year since a blue-ribbon commission on military suicide prevention issued its final report and a list of recommendations for major changes at the Pentagon. But many of its key recommendations — including the creation of a Pentagon-level office to coordinate the roughly 900 suicide prevention programs across the force — have not been implemented.

Now a U.S. senator is ratcheting up pressure on the Defense Department to set those proposed changes in motion. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., fired off a letter Wednesday after the Army reported that suicides among soldiers had reached a new all-time high.
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