General Pittard blames "selfish" suicide comment taken out of context

I can tell you that I did not "take it out of context" and read the whole thing! It stunned me that it was on the Fort Bliss site from January when he put it up until it made the news

General's blog post reignites Army suicide debate By Yochi J. Dreazen National Journal May 22, 2012

Up until then, the only people reading what he wrote were on the Fort Bliss site.

He was totally off base at best or actually feels that way. Considering he wrote the retraction after pressure from higher ups while "working out in the gym" it pretty much showed how much he thinks about what he writes.

Now he claims it was taken out of context? Sorry but a little too little and a lot too late.

Pittard's eureka moment didn't come the day after he wrote it, or a week when he thought better about it. It only came out after it was brought to the public's attention.

Army Maj. Gen. Pittard, in York for ceremony, says he regrets controversial comments about suicide
Pittard said statements on a blog post about suicide were taken out of context.
By BILL LANDAUER
Daily Record/Sunday News
Updated: 06/09/2012

York, PA - A U.S. Army general who came under fire recently for what he wrote about suicide said his comments were taken out of context.

Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the 1st Armored Division, said he'd written the blog post in January to persuade soldiers suffering mental anguish to seek help.

The post, which Pittard later removed and replaced with a retraction, was about 20 lines long, he said. However, several lines from the post were quoted in the media recently.

"I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act. I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess," the lines read. "Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us." But Pittard said he understands the criticism.

If he read the offending lines out of context, "I'd be outraged, too," he said.

Pittard has written nine other blog posts about suicide prevention at Fort Bliss since July 2010, a matter he says he is both "compassionate and passionate" about. He pointed to his base's lower-than-average suicide rates and the success of programs such as Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training.

Some soldiers think "it's a weakness to get help," Pittard said. "I myself have been in behavioral health. I believe in behavioral health."

Pittard said he and his family sought behavioral health care before he took his job at Fort Bliss. "There's not stigma at Fort Bliss," he said. "But there's enough out there that a senior leader was reluctant to get help."
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First ASIST is not new.

Uploaded by ChoicePeerAdvocacy on Sep 2, 2009
Josh Koerner Talks about ASIST: Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training A community solution to the community problem of Suicide

Battlemind is not new either but the name has changed to "Resiliency Training" basically telling the servicemen and women they can "toughen their mind" leaving them with the impression if they end up with PTSD, they were weak minded and didn't train right.

Battle for the Mind
A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing [Paperback]
William Sargant (Author)
October 1, 1997
How can an evangelist convert a hardboiled sophisticate? Why does a POW sign a "confession" that he knows is false? How is a criminal pressured into admitting his guilt? Do the evangelist, the POW's captor, and the policeman use similar methods to gain their ends? These and other compelling questions are discussed in the definitive work by William Sargant, who for many years until his death in 1988 was a leading physician in psychological medicine. Sargant spells out and illustrates the basic techniques used by evangelists, psychiatrists, and brain-washers to disperse the patterns of belief and behavior already established in the minds of their hearers, and to substitute new patterns for them.

Is the Military Battle Mind based on this premiss?

Then they tried this.

CAM at Fort Bliss from 2008
Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Integrative Care for Acute Combat-induced PTSD
By Joe C. Chang, MAOM, diplOM, lAc

The initiatives at the Ft. Bliss and Ft. Hood Restoration and Resilience Center, Ft. Bliss, Texas, were developed through the strong advocacy of supervising psychologist, Dr. John E. Fortunato of the Department of Mental Health at William Beaumont Army Medical Center, El Paso, Texas, who supports an inte- grative approach in the treatment of PTSD in post-deployment soldiers. Dr. Fortunato saw a benefit in CAM modalities and believed that the use of CAM therapies in conjunction with standard Western protocols would provide the best treatment approach. He was inspired to develop the program by his frustration at seeing soldiers with PTSD who had difficulty coping forced out of the military against their wishes. Dr. Fortunato was convinced that the traditional methods of treating PTSD were not long enough in duration and were not intense or comprehensive enough.

This integrative approach treats many of the symptoms of PTSD that are not addressed through standard mental health protocols that include cognitive-behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy. Dr. Fortunato’s concept eventually led to the implementation of the Ft. Bliss Restoration & Resilience Center, incorporating massage therapy, pool therapy, expressive art therapy, meditation, yoga, acupuncture, marital/family therapy and reiki with the standard treatment protocols of cognitive-behavioral & cathartic psychothera- pies and pharmacotherapy.

But that didn't work either considering this came out in 2010

As a Brigade Returns Safe, Some Meet New Enemies
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: July 13, 2010
FORT BLISS, Tex. — The soldiers of the Fourth Brigade, First Armored Division, have been home from Iraq for three months now, the danger of snipers and roadside bombs no longer a threat, the war for them over.

But the odds that some of them will die violent deaths continues, so just as he did when his battalion was operating in Iraq, Command Sgt. Maj. Sa’eed Mustafa constantly warns his soldiers about the perils of letting their guard down where they are supposed to be safest — in their own homes.

“We talk about the enemy here, which is different from the enemy downrange, but which is just as deadly,” he said, using the military term used for a combat zone.

In fact, given the brigade’s record at Fort Bliss of suicide, murder, assault, drunken driving and drug use, its troops are statistically at greater risk at home than while deployed in Iraq. During the past year, only one of the unit’s soldiers died in combat, but in 2008, the last time the brigade was home from Iraq, seven soldiers were killed and six others committed crimes in which at least four civilians and soldiers from outside the brigade died in a little more than a year.

What actually does work is a long list because there is no one size fits all in any of this. What does not work is telling them it is their fault because they didn't train right and are weak minded. It does not work to call the dead selfish because they ran out of hope of getting the help they needed to heal from where they've been especially when they cared so much about the men they were deployed with to push their pain aside for as long as they were in danger and wait until they returned back to the states to allow themselves to feel it all. It does not work when someone in Pittard's position cannot manage to see any of this and then blame others for taking what he wrote out of context!

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General Pittard, was Marine Clay Hunt selfish too?

General Pittard retracts "selfish suicide" statement