Surge of military suicides is confounding experts for a reason

Surge of military suicides is confounding experts for a reason
by Chaplain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
September 20, 2012

They didn't learn from the past because they keep ignoring what we already knew.

This is what they get when they keep asking the same questions to the same people and expect they get a different answer. They won't listen to people ready, willing and able to offer solutions that have worked for decades!

Surge of military suicides is confounding experts
Posted: September 19, 2012
By The Times-Union

The nation is long past the warning stage regarding a high rate of suicides in the military.

So it is especially disturbing to see that it took two years for one of the major recommendations contained in a task force report to be implemented.

A Suicide Prevention Office has been established in the Defense Department. What took so long?

That the Defense Department needs a special office for this problem ought to be obvious given all the attention and funds devoted to suicide prevention.

This is frustrating for the families of those who have taken their lives.

Suicides are increasing, and it’s nothing new. The numbers are double a decade ago.

In fact, in early June the number of suicides for active duty personnel was greater than the number of troops dying in battle.

It’s on a pace to set a record high, The New York Times reports.

The rate for the first six months of the year was nearly one suicide per day.

Suicide is difficult in any circumstance because it involves a general lack of attention to mental illness in this society.

The military would seem especially vulnerable to suicide when you consider the three key traits of people who die by suicide.

The three traits were identified by Thomas Joiner, a professor and psychologist at Florida State University. His father committed suicide, so Joiner has devoted great energies to understanding it.

The traits:

- Burdensomeness: People perceive they are a burden to loved ones. This feeling can turn into a motive for suicide.
- Alienation: Without support, someone is more vulnerable to feeling a burden.
Veterans can return home and feel estranged from family and friends. There is much discussion of military suicides that are spurred by a failed relationship or a failed civilian job. These may place the person at risk for the final and fatal trait.
- Learned fearlessness: Human beings are conditioned not to hurt themselves. The ability to inflict a fatal attack on oneself usually takes a long time to acquire.

For someone in the active military who has been around death regularly, there is a greater likelihood to follow through with a suicide attempt. It is not an act of cowardice, Joiner says. Far from it.

Why do people commit suicide? To escape from intense psychological suffering.
read more here

The Vietnam War (Conflict) taught many lessons. The first one is that PTSD does not distinguish between where or when the combat happened and it never will. PTSD has been labeled with many titles but the results have all been the same. We send humans into combat hoping they were trained to become someone different but leaving them changed without training them how to live the rest of their lives as veterans.

These are some of the numbers from Vietnam.

Casualty Category
ACCIDENT
9,107
DECLARED DEAD
1,201
DIED OF WOUNDS
5,299
HOMICIDE
236
ILLNESS
938
KILLED IN ACTION
40,934
PRESUMED DEAD (BODY REMAINS RECOVERED)
32
PRESUMED DEAD (BODY REMAINS NOT RECOVERED)
91
SELF-INFLICTED
382
Total Records
58,220

Vietnam War Statistics
Casualties:
Hostile deaths: 47,359

Non-hostile deaths: 10,797

Total: 58,156 (including men formerly classified as MIA and Mayaguez casualties).

Highest state death rate: West Virginia--84.1.
(The national average death rate for males in 1970 was 58.9 per 100,000).

WIA: 303,704 - 153,329 required hospitalization, 50,375 who did not.

Severely disabled: 75,000, 23,214 were classified 100% disabled. 5,283 lost limbs, 1,081 sustained multiple amputations.

Amputation or crippling wounds to the lower extremities were 300% higher than in WWII and 70% higher than in Korea. Multiple amputations occurred at the rate of 18.4% compared to 5.7% in WWII.

MIA: 2,338

POW: 766, of whom 114 died in captivity.

Draftees vs. volunteers:

25% (648,500) of total forces in country were draftees. (66% of U.S. armed forces members were drafted during WWII)

Draftees accounted for 30.4% (17,725) of combat deaths in Vietnam.

Reservists KIA: 5,977

National Guard: 6,140 served; 101 died.

for more information click above link

It is not that it was not happening to our families, or that we lacked the courage to talk about it. No one was listening. We suffered in silence. We suffered in isolation. We had to learn on our own how to save their lives, our families and raise our children we well as possible considering they were also without support from their peers.

They returned to a country where no one wanted to know anything about where they were, what they did, any more than they wanted to know about what happened afterwards.

Accelerated mortality rates of Vietnam Veterans A comprehensive research study by the University of California at San Francisco published in the March 6, 1986 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, titled "Delayed Effects of the Military Draft on Mortality," disclosed that Vietnam veterans were 86% more likely than non-veterans to die of suicide in the years after the war, and 53% more likely to die in traffic accidents. The researchers claim that this study of California and Pennsylvania men is the first to show a cause-and-effect relationship between military service during the Vietnam War and an unusual risk of suicide.

While we're pretending that Combat PTSD is new, while researchers fail to learn what was learned many years ago by other researchers, while new families never get to hear what worked for us, they scratch their heads wondering what they're missing.

Here is just one more piece they are missing in all of this.

Suicide as a traumatic event

Researchers have also examined exposure to suicide as a traumatic event. Studies show that trauma from exposure to suicide can contribute to PTSD. In particular, adults and adolescents are more likely to develop PTSD as a result of exposure to suicide if one or more of the following conditions are true: if they witness the suicide, if they are very connected with the person who dies, or if they have a history of psychiatric illness (20,21,22). Studies also show that traumatic grief is more likely to arise after exposure to traumatic death such as suicide (23,24). Traumatic grief refers to a syndrome in which individuals experience functional impairment, a decline in physical health, and suicidal ideation. These symptoms occur independent of other conditions such as depression and anxiety.

Families need to know that when they come home, it is our duty to fight for them after combat. We know them best and love them more. I knew what PTSD was when I got married but what I didn't know was how to stop feeling as if I was alone.

I had to fight my husband to get help, fight my family and his trying to get them to understand, fight my friends and coworkers, the government and then had to fight society to try to get them to listen. I fell in love with a Vietnam veteran 30 years ago and ended up fighting this battle for us and for all the other families out there just like mine.

Keep that in mind when the suicide reports come out next month and know, they could have prevented most of them if they learned from the past.

Read FOR THE LOVE OF JACK, HIS WAR/MY BATLLE and learn what we've known for all these years.