Military suicides twice the rate of civilians

Military suicides twice the rate of civilians
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 21, 2013

This is Suicide Awareness Month. Part of being aware of suicides we need to begin with facts and a little history lesson. The first one is there is a nice little trick being played on the press. When they interview military brass, they will get what the brass wants to tell them about enlisted troops but what they don't talk about are the number of discharged troops they no longer have to track. When they talk to VA heads about veterans suicides, again, they only talk about the veterans and not the troops. Each government group's numbers are shocking but when you put them together they are devastating.

A more troubling report is the number of attempted suicides that no one really wants to talk about. After all, they survived so no big deal. Right? Wrong. The attempted suicides are the canaries in the coal mine because we've seen it going back to Vietnam veterans.

They came home with nothing available for them so you'd expect to see their suicides at a high rate. As a matter of fact they are the majority of the suicides tied to military service plus the highest group in the VA claims backlog. With everything available for them now along with the new generation, no one seems to be asking why they survived all these years only to end their own lives now.

That is the question we need to be asking about all veterans and active duty troops. Why do they want to die after they survived combat? They wanted to live during it but they don't want to live after it? This doesn't seem to bother anyone enough.

When it comes to veterans the simple fact is they are twice the rate of civilian suicides. When you take the report of 22 a day committing suicide and then add in the latest number from the VA on attempted suicides, that means there are 55 veterans a day deciding they no longer want to live. Pretty bad considering how much has been done since 2008. Then we need to add in the number of military suicides but unlike the press reporting the numbers without Army National Guards and Army Reservists, which turned out to be at least 494 suicides for 2012.

As bad as that number was, we do not know how many attempted suicide but in the Suicide Event Report for 2011, the last report done, there were 915 no longer wanting to live.

2011 Air Force 50
241 attempted suicide

Army 167
440 attempted suicide

Marines 32
156 attempted suicide

Navy 52
87 attempted suicide

Department of Defense Suicide Event Report for 2011
For 2011 there were 935 attempted suicides in the military with 915 individuals trying to kill themselves. 896 tried once, 18 tried twice and 1 tried three times.

This morning I was reading a news report from KAJ18 News with this in it.

"Montana also has the highest rate of veterans per capita of any state in the United States. Veterans are twice as at risk for suicide as non-veterans," pointed out Kellie LaFave the suicide prevention coordinator at the VA hospital.

Soldiers are at higher risk for suicide because of their exposure to combat situations, isolation from their families and their intense training. This can lead to anxiety, chronic pain and sleep deprivation. All of these factors can lead to suicide.

"We have had our struggle here at the Montana National Guard, with suicide. And, one is too many, and that is really the message that we put out to our membership. Cause one suicide is just too many so we all need to what we can," Montana National Guard spokesperson Major Tim Crowe said.

If you read that and didn't know the history of the Montana National Guards then you'll just think it is a terrible story they are doing something about. This is nails on a blackboard to the families left behind because this just didn't happen. It started a long time ago and thanks to the digital world, there is proof of what they knew and when they knew it.

Spc. Chris Dana killed himself March 4, 2007. By 2008 the Montana National Guards decided to do something to prevent more soldiers like Chris from ending their own lives.

"Montana has gone beyond the level of other states in the country, and I applaud that," said Capt. Joan Hunter, a U.S. Public Service officer who was recently designated the director of psychological health for the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C.

"They saw an emergency need, studied the problems and make some significant improvements," Hunter said Friday.

State Adjutant General Randy Mosley said that the effort stems from a former Montana soldier who didn't get the help he needed and who killed himself a year ago.

"We want to make sure we're doing everything we can to help our people and their families pick up the pieces for the problems that may have begun during their deployment in Iraq," Mosley said last week.

I has a lot of hope back then that the military finally got it. They had to do more, which they seemed to have understood but it turned out to be more of the same.

The announcement, given at a briefing in the State Capitol, comes 18 months after the suicide of a Helena soldier prompted Gov. Brian Schweitzer to challenge Montana’s senior military leaders to scrutinize the Guard’s post-deployment atmosphere.

“We will do whatever it takes to make our soldiers whole,” Schweitzer said at Tuesday’s briefing. “I’m proud that our National Guard has taken the lead. We’re not perfect and we won’t be perfect, even after this war. But we’ll learn, we’ll modify and we will change.”

Since 2001, the Montana Guard has seen more than 245,000 service-member deployments in the war on terror.

From 2004 to 2006, as many as 1,400 state soldiers deployed to Iraq, triggering concerns back home that the Montana Guard, like much of the nation’s military, was ill-equipped to deal with the mental-health consequences of war.

This sounded so good that President Obama went to find out more about this program when he was still a Senator and on the Veterans Affairs Committee. The press did not follow him there. I found the report out of The Gazette.

Since Dana’s death, his stepbrother Matt Kuntz has campaigned for more awareness of the costs of untreated post traumatic stress syndrome in Iraq war veterans. Wednesday, he was invited to meet with Sen. Barack Obama to share the message he’s been spreading statewide for more than a year. At a quiet picnic table at Riverfront Park Obama sat across from Kuntz, his wife Sandy and their infant daughter Fiona.

Kuntz was heavy with emotion, but hopeful and eager to share Dana’s story, and tell the senator about his work to ensure other Montana veterans aren’t suffering from the same condition that made his step-brother take his life.

"He (Obama) told me he understood why we need to have additional screenings for PTSD," said Matt Kuntz, Dana's stepbrother, who was among a small group invited to meet with Obama on Wednesday in Billings. "And he told me when he is elected president, he will implement Montana's pilot program nationwide."

Kuntz, who recently gave up his job as a lawyer in Helena to advocate for the mentally ill and their families, said he was invited to brief Obama on how Montana had become a national model for assessing the mental health of its combat vets.

Besides the additional screenings, the Montana National Guard has developed crisis response teams that include a chaplain to investigate behavioral problems among its troops, and TriWest Healthcare pays to have four part-time counselors on hand to talk with soldiers and airmen during weekend drills.

After the briefing, Obama spent about 20 minutes telling several hundred veterans and their families that, if elected as president, he will be committed to meeting their needs.

That seemed so hopeful but even with Obama paying attention after election, no one has been held accountable when every year the suicides went up along with attempted suicides. Billions of dollars have gone into "prevention" but produced more funerals that didn't need to happen.

By 2012 Ryan Ranalli was grieving for the loss of 7 he served with in Iraq. They committed suicide. The report again came from the Gazette.

'You're taught in the military that you don't ask for help'

Ranalli, a retired U.S. Army sergeant, saw how the deaths gutted family members.

Despite struggling with the demons of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, Ranalli, 33, vowed that suicide would never be an option.

Yet about 9 p.m. on April 8, an angry and drunken Ranalli mumbled something to his wife, “I love you,” or “You know I will always love you” and sought refuge in the family’s garage.

There, the 200-pound, 6-foot, 3-inch veteran grabbed a parachute cord, wrapped it around his neck and slung it over a beam.

His horrified wife, Jamie, placed a frantic call to his parents who live two minutes away and then went to the garage to be with her husband of two years.

“I thought if I was standing there he wasn’t going to do anything,” Jamie said, choking back tears.

Ranalli’s father cut the cord to rescue his son.

He was transported immediately to the VA hospital.

The drunken episode was the first in about two years.

“I didn’t ever expect that to happen,” Jamie said. “That’s never been him. In my heart I don’t believe it was a serious attempt. I believe it was a cry for help. I believe he was just so overloaded with the feelings and the emotions. Of course, the drinking didn’t help any of that. I believe he was screaming to get him somewhere where he could unload all of this.”

Ranalli remembers nothing of that night, but recalls with precision the events that led to his alcohol-fueled decision.

He was a squad leader with the 502nd Infantry Brigade in March 2003 when it headed the 101st Airborne’s combat air assault into Iraq. The ninth anniversary of the invasion triggered memories of dates when comrades were killed and of defining firefights and battles. He recalled vivid images of combat, images he had suppressed and never discussed.

Wounded Times tracked these stories so that no one would be able to spin anything anymore. There is no way for the DOD or the VA to spin what the reality has been for military families.