Do you think the 113th Congress will save veteran lives?

UPDATE
The enemy within: Soldier suicides outpaced combat deaths in 2012
By Bill Briggs
NBC News contributor

Some Army families who recently lost members to suicide criticize the branch for failing to aggressively shake a culture in which soldiers believe they'll be deemed weak and denied promotion if they seek mental health aid. They also blame Army leaders for focusing more heavily on weeding out emotionally troubled soldiers to artificially suppress the branch's suicide stats versus embracing and helping members who are exhibiting clear signs of trouble.

Furthermore, in September, two U.S. lawmakers pressured the Pentagon to immediately use unspent money specifically appropriated to the agency to help slow the suicides within the military. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., and Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, also pushed for increased anti-suicide funding for the Department of Defense in 2013. “The Pentagon hasn’t spent the money that it has for suicide prevention for this year — and that money wasn’t nearly enough money to reach all the soldiers who need help.

Now we are hearing about bureaucratic technicalities at the Pentagon that are preventing them from acting. This is unconscionable,” Rep. McDermott said. “The Pentagon is funded to help soldiers and needs to do much more on the epidemic of suicides."

Do you think the 113th Congress will save veteran lives?
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
January 4, 2013


There is another bill coming out of congress touted as "suicide prevention" but if you think it will really make a difference, you need to know about all the others. Once you know what has failed, they will point to what succeeded so that you don't put it all together.

I could have been famous if I sucked up to the right people. The problem was I more interested in doing the right thing. I was a hell of lot more interested in holding politicians and military brass accountable than pandering to them. As for the groups of bloggers and reporters out there playing political games, they are a huge part of what has happened.

In 2001, with troops sent into Afghanistan, Republicans controlled the White House and the House. Yet for all the talk about how much the troops meant to them, none of them saw fit to increase the people working for the VA to take care of the wounded that would return from there. The 108th Congress was all Republican and so was the 109th. The 110th was in Democratic control as well as the 111th. The 112th was split again with the Senate in Democratic control and the House in Republican hands just as now as we begin the 113th.

What's my point? The suicides and attempted suicides went up every year. Money spent on "addressing" suicides and PTSD kept going up but what was not happening was accountability. I get the impression too many want to support their own political views instead of actually supporting the men and women these politicians send into combat. So when I say that Democrats are better at taking care of the troops and veterans, it is with evidence. The same evidence that also proves they suck at it too.

On one of my old blogs, Screaming In An Empty Room, there is a comment from one of the first families to contact me on military suicides.

JulieW said... We lost our Josh, an Iraqi War Vet, US Army Reserves to PTSD just 8 weeks ago. Please help us spread the word about this killer disease! Statistics are now showing that up to 50% of our Vets are returning from Iraq with some degree of PTSD. This is an epidemic the Government is trying to hide under the rug because the VA is not equipped to handle this huge number, nor do they have the funding to do so! HELP US, spread the word and send Josh's site (with his story, research/studies/etc) to EVERYONE you know, post it on the main page of your blogs, GET THE AMERICAN PUBLIC to take notice!

Here is Josh's site

This is the from the family of Joshua Omvig. The Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill is one of the first suicide prevention bills.

The post was PTSD Claims More Lives. Why? I was fed up almost 7 years ago when I wrote it. The same month I posted More lives lost for Bush from suicides. I cared a lot longer about all of this going back to 1982.

I didn't care about politics or playing nice with others.

I still don't as long as these men and women are losing the last battle for their lives. Too many are not asking the right questions. How is it a warfighter manages to stay alive in combat against bullets and bombs, seeing what they see, hearing what they hear, smelling what they smell and enduring all the hardships of deployments into combat and then take their own lives after all of it?

In 2006 I put up the first PTSD video on YouTube later transferred to Great Americans.

PTSD and suicides are only part of the story. Too many times you don't get to know about the ones surviving combat and attempted suicides. I do. The families know about them. While it sounds good that the Veterans Crisis Line has done 30,000 successful interventions across the country since 2007 it is not good because that means at least 30,000 veterans reach the point of wanting to die more than they wanted to live. There were hundreds of thousands of calls to crisis line in those years, yet no one was asking why they wanted to die after combat deployments ended and they were back home. No one is asking about the results the past attempts to address and treat PTSD have produced these disgusting results or who is responsible for all of this.

So now that you have some background on all of this, maybe now you'll understand why I cannot rejoice about one more Suicide Prevention Bill coming out of Washington.

New Law to Require Better Military Suicide Prevention Programs
NBC News
KNDU
Posted: Jan 03, 2013

WASHINGTON D.C. - Military Services will soon be improving their suicide prevention programs. Today, President Obama signed U.S. Senator Patty Murray's amendment into law.

As part of the National Defense Authorization Act, the law requires that the Pentagon implements a standardized and comprehensive suicide prevention program.

Murray crafted the amendment after a study by the RAND Corporation found inconsistencies in military suicide prevention, and that the number of active duty suicides continued to rise in 2012. read more here