Military suicide research nothing more than pure BS

Military suicide research nothing more than pure BS
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 9, 2013

Wednesday I was reading headline after headline declaring that combat is not tied to military suicides. The article said it was mental health issues instead. I responded with a post Data shows researchers didn't want to tie combat to military suicides because it was the truth. Researchers will only find what they are looking for.

Defeating PTSD is my only agenda. I can't stand politics anymore. I delete emails from political groups. Political groups are just as bad as politicians defending their own views while avoiding the truth from the other side. Plus all these groups claiming to be oh so patriotic never seem to be interested in the patriots we send into combat. Look at all the reports we have showing how much they suffer while the politicians and military brass deny responsibility. Military suicides, attempted suicides and going without proper help to recover from where they've been is tied to the rise in veteran suicides but you'll never hear the truth be told by any of them.

I stay out of arguments on the reasons given to send troops into Afghanistan and Iraq. No war has every been fought honestly. Politicians always seem to cook the data to support what they want to do. They don't really care because they don't have to go with the men and women they send. My job is to help them understand that they were not really willing to die for any other cause than the men and women they were sent to risk their lives with.

I have zero patience for charities claiming to be doing everything for the veterans when it turns out the heads are doing it for the money and we still end up seeing an ever growing list of reports with veterans going without any help at all. If the endless list of charities were doing their jobs, we wouldn't see so many veterans taking their own lives and families left behind wondering what they did wrong.

So why am I angry this morning? Email after email has the title declaring there is no link to combat and suicides. None of the publications challenged that claim other than Wounded Times. It is almost as if they stopped caring a long time ago what all their news reports have in fact tied to suicides. While it is true according to the data from the military a good portion of the suicides happened without being deployed into combat, they don't remind you that training itself is dangerous. They don't remind you about military sexual assaults and how PTSD can come after both of those as we have seen in the civilian population. They do not tell you that hazing is still going on. God forbid they ever mention the fact that veterans are committing suicide many years after service. This is all a massive political campaign going on across the country to keep our eyes closed to the truth. If the press isn't asking questions, they are part of the problem and we should be interested enough to be asking why they are not telling us what we need do know.

Back to the headline of suicides not being tied to combat. The report said "Researchers said the analysis of 83 suicides between 2001 and 2008 does not support the assumption that experiences in combat - such as seeing dead bodies or firing a gun - and time spent in a war zone are directly tied to a higher suicide risk."

Yet this was also done and looking at far more than 83.

"The suicide rate was highest among those who are currently deployed (18.3 deaths per 100,000) and dropped after deployment (15.9 per 100,000). For the entire TAIHOD dataset (from 2004 through 2008), 23 percent of the soldiers studied were currently deployed, 42 percent had never been deployed and 35 percent had been previously deployed but were not currently deployed.
(Army STARRS Preliminary Data Reveal Some Potential Predictive Factors for Suicide March 22, 2011)"

Last time I checked math 35+23=58%, far more than the 42% they said were "not-deployed" but this data is tied to extended research done by the military.

This data is supported by many other research findings including this one from 2003 to 2007.

2003 Army 79 26 while deployed
2004 Army 67 13 while deployed
2005 Army 87 25 while deployed
2006 Army 99 30 while deployed
(Army Suicide Prevention Program Fact Sheet, Army Public Affairs, August 17, 2007)
2007 Army 115 36 while deployed (50 deployed prior to suicide and 29 not deployed)

Far more than the 83 the recent researchers looked at. So how are we supposed to take that research so seriously it is worthy of every media outlet repeating it? It isn't but reporters no longer have the ability to do their own research in their own reporting done over the last 12 years.

Tomorrow Wounded Times will be six years old. It has 19,454 posts including this one. On August 14, 2007 I asked why the press wasn't on suicide watch. The numbers back then were shocking. Even more shocking is the fact that while they were all reported by newspapers across the country, they were not just about "current" military folks. They were also about the men and women suffering after they got back home. In other words, as long as they were no longer enlisted, the military could stop counting them.

The Army expects 2007 will have been one of the worst in years in terms of suicide among active soldiers. If 32 cases still under investigation add to the 89 confirmed, 121 suicides represent a 20% spike from 2006, more than twice the number reported in 2001, pushing the Army rate closer to that seen among the civilian community.

Even more alarming, according to Department of Defense sources, attempted suicides rose to more than 2,000, up from about 1400 in 2006.

As you can see that was from 2007 but 2012 was the highest on record. We still don't know the exact numbers since the Suicide Event Report has not been released yet. When you put all of this together it should be a clear indication that when it comes to the press and the military, neither one of them are telling us the whole truth.

So who is lying now? Who is trying to spin the numbers instead of find the answers? What is worse is the fact this country is full of hacks just acting like parrots instead of patriots. Don't the troops and veterans deserve more out of us?

I would have loved to end these six years worth of work with a headline tomorrow declaring number of suicides at an all time low and number of veterans in recovery at an all time high. Instead I am putting together another report like the one you just read more about suffering and the lies we are being told to cover up the fact the DOD and the VA are not doing what they need to do and congress is too ignorant to care. We also have a Commander-in-Chief without the courage to hold his Joint Chiefs accountable for what is going on. I am sure he cares but now I am wondering how much he really cares about them. No one is held accountable for anything from the top of the food chain all the way down to the lowly Private being discharged for a "personality disorder" that suddenly showed up the day he asked for help to recover from being sent to Afghanistan. Once they are out of the military, no one counts them either. Another nice little trick they love to play so that stupid, lazy researchers can get the headlines for feeding the American public a load of total bullshit after telling them it was steak.

I don't have the luxury of spinning anything for the simple reason of this blog. With over 19,000 posts taken from news reports the data is all there for anyone to find.