Huffington Post doing all they can to stop military suicides

The Huffington Post has been running a series of articles on military suicides under Invisible Casualties with a bounty of articles written from many different perspectives.

This is one of them

Bless the Huffington Post for running this series. There is so much that has been known for a very long time and the authors of these articles have done their homework. This one really hit me because among my "jobs" is being Florida State Coordinator of Point Man International Ministries.

Point Man started in 1984 addressing the "moral injury" and have had it right all along. If you leave out the spirit, they are not healing or restoring their relationships with their families. Healing has been happening all these years and Vietnam veterans have proven that it is never too late.

Coming Home from War Is Hell: Preventing Veteran Suicides
Huffington Post
Rita Nakashima Brock, Ph. D.
Director, The Soul Repair Center
September 6, 2013

In 2009, suicides in the active duty military surpassed the general population rate for the first time. A Pentagon study published in August 2013 claimed the rates were not affected by combat, but their study was of active duty and recently retired military. Veteran Affairs clinicians tell a different story for veterans.

Veteran suicide rates are alarmingly high. At twenty-two a day, they are three times the civilian rate, and combat takes a disproportionate toll. Those who have killed have a two to three times higher rate of suicide than other veterans, even when other factors, such as PTSD, mental illness, or drug and alcohol abuse, are factored out. Also noteworthy is this detail: the average age of veteran suicides is around 55 whereas it is 43 for civilians.

Why this age difference? In late 2009, a group of VA clinicians suggested that a major factor in veteran suicides was moral injury. Moral injury occurs when a war combatant violates deeply held moral beliefs and can no longer make sense out of the world. Vietnam veteran and philosopher Camillo "Mac" Bica describes it as the destruction of moral identity. Retired VA psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in Achilles in Vietnam explains it as the unmaking of character. It happens in many ways: killing; failing to stop an atrocity or committing one; having to follow an order or fight a war one thinks is wrong; failing to save a friend's life; or treating human remains disrespectfully.

Moral injury is a response of personal agency and is different from PTSD, which is an involuntary victim reaction to terror under life-threatening conditions that affects the limbic brain system. Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman notes in Trauma and Recovery that once severe symptoms of PTSD calm down, moral questions emerge.

Shay insists that moral injury is not a clinical condition that can be treated with individual counseling. It is a responsibility of our whole society, especially of communities where veterans live and work. Yet, as many veterans attest, their struggle to come home after war is aggravated by civilians because we are largely clueless about what is truly required to bring people all the way home.
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