Airmen suicides serve somber reminders

Airmen suicides serve somber reminders
by Chaplain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
August 4, 2012

This article lists what has been proven to work but the reporter is way off base on the headline. This is more of a reminder that what they are doing does not work. If it did, suicides and attempted suicides would have gone down, not up. Hell, as a matter of fact, considering how long the DOD has been providing "help" even a couple of suicides a month is deplorable.

Airmen suicides serve somber reminders that help is available
Posted: Aug 03, 2012
By JD Wallace
TUCSON, AZ
Tucson News Now

Mental, physical, social, and spiritual health are the four fronts of mental health that aim to fight problems such as suicide in the Air Force and at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. After two suicides by airmen at D-M last month, members of its mental and spiritual health community remind airmen that they must come forward with their problems if they're going to receive the help that they need.

The past ten years have been particularly stressful with combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Multiple deployments have repeated the challenge of leaving and then returning to family life for many airmen. The base offers counseling for a variety of sources of stress, from financial to marital. From staying physically fit, to keeping mentally occupied, to staying socially active, and to staying spiritually involved, base professionals urge airmen keep themselves balanced. Spiritual involvement does not necessarily mean being religious but recognizing that something larger exists.
read more here

It is because they do not know how to make all of these work! They do not understand the damage is done in the very start but using "resiliency" training with the purpose of getting them to train their brains to be mentally tough enough. For heaven's sake! When will they get it? When will they understand that telling them this translates into "you're mentally weak, didn't train right and that's why you have PTSD" so it's your fault. If your commander told you this I doubt you'd ever open your mouth to get help afterwards. You'd look at the buddies you were with and notice they seem fine while you're falling apart and think they are tougher than you are.

What do they think "mental" help means? If they think it means giving them drugs to numb the pain and more drugs to get them to pass out so they can sleep, that is part of the problem. If that is all they are getting with "mental health" treatment, then they are not addressing the cause of the symptoms. They are numbing them, not healing them.

What does staying physically fit mean? Working out in a gym and punching a bag or lifting weights? Gee now that will really calm someone down. It gets the adrenaline pumping! For the body, experts recommend what does work to calm down, which is vital when dealing with Combat PTSD. Take a walk with calm music in earphones to drown out any upsetting thoughts to re-teach your body to work without being stressed out. Yoga works to help you to breathe and relax just as mediation works.

Social? Well to them that could include drinking in a bar which also adds to the symptoms. You may be around other people but not in a good way. If you are hanging out with a bunch of friends that were not in the military, that can be a good thing but it can also be a bad thing. You won't feel as if you can talk to them about what's going on with you if they don't have a clue about where you were or what your deployment was like. If they don't they will give you crap for advice. If you're hanging out with others who were in combat but are as uninformed as you are about courage, what being mentally tough really is and what causes Combat PTSD, then you can also get crap for advice especially if they bought the same line that you didn't train your brain right.

If they do know the facts and have begun to heal, then great. They can help you get to where they are. If you are in group therapy, that's also a good thing as long as the people in the group are not allowed to just make claims not based on fact. Someone with knowledge has to lead the way. This is also important for the families to be able to talk to people, learn from them and be supported.

The spiritual aspect is also important but the wrong kind can do more harm than good. Soldiers have reported finding the courage to talk to a Chaplain for help and then walking away feeling worse because they were told they were going to hell if they did not convert to their faith. Yep. It is true. Some Chaplains have told reporters they see nothing wrong with this. After all, that is what their faith base is built on. What does work spiritually is getting them to stop feeling as if they're evil. Getting them to look at every part of what happened instead of the last horrible image in their mind and seeing how even in that kind of horror, love lived there as well. If they believe God turned His back on that place, those people and them, then how can they even begin to think of praying again? How can they be expected to reach out to someone they believe let it all happen? They can't. They have to see that while God allows the freewill of humans to do good things as well as bad things, when humans decide to do good even in the face of evil, God's love lived there.

When they hear something stupid after a friend of their's was just blown up that God needed him home, or God only gives us what we can handle, then believe they will blame God instead of turning to Him for strength. Man killed their buddy and God opened His arms to take their buddy home again. It had nothing to do with being more worthy of living or less, anything as simple as it was just their time to die while time for others to live or any other crap answer people can think of in the moment, it requires thought based on knowledge of what God said and yes, what Christ actually said and not what some other human had to say they thought it all meant.

If they are not "religious" or Christian, then they can still understand what the Bible says regarding parts similar to the Sermon on the Mount. You do not have to preach at them in order to reach them. You need to talk to them so they understand another human cares about them even though they feel they are not worth caring about.

That if they still believe they need to be forgiven for something, knowing God forgives them is not the end of it. They have to be able to forgive themselves which is even harder than understanding God forgave them.

So far the DOD has been all too able to do what is easy and claim they are doing everything that experts say needs to be done but if they are doing it wrong, this is the result that will continue. Filling graves is not the outcome they had in mind but if no one is telling them what they are getting wrong, there will be even more suicides and grieving families asking "why" it happened.

We're so far behind on helping them heal that families are on the front lines but are the last to know the facts about what they can do to help or what they do wrong to make it worse. The answers are out there but if they are also turning to the wrong people for support, they are failed as well.

We owe it to them to get it right just as we owe it to the others it is too late for.

Stay informed by supporting this work.

Point Man of Winter Park is a 501c3