Military Suicide Awareness Month Makes Us Aware They Suck At Preventing Them

Awareness of the wrong results
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 16, 2014

Wounded Times

The numbers are bad yet after years of "prevention" along with "awareness" topped off with billions of dollars spent, most of the people I know are feeling the loss at an unbearable level. Why? Because we've been doing this for so long now that we know what works actually works.

We have to get the facts right first. Tired of reading all the wrong data being used over and over again.

Veteran suicides and military suicides are two separated groups. The DOD counts active duty while the VA is responsible for veterans. Stop blending them together.

Military suicides reported average was less than 1 a day but here is the truth on that one.

According to the Pentagon, 74 active-duty personnel died by suicide in the first quarter: 19 airmen, 28 soldiers, 11 Marines and 16 sailors.

Sure it is less than one a day until National Guards and Reservists manage to matter.

From January to March, 120 active-duty, reserve and National Guard members died by suicide.

The total number of days between Tuesday, January 1st, 2013 and Monday, April 1st, 2013 is 90 days.

How does 120 end up being equal to 90? Do you think they are missing a month somewhere?

Veteran suicides reported at 22 a day. Not even close. The number used came from 21 states and then they took the average of those states excluding California with the most veterans, followed by Texas with the second highest and then Florida with the 3rd highest.

Veteran suicides are mostly Afghanistan and Iraq veterans but again, not even close. 78% of the suicides within the VA system are 50 and over. One more thing that keeps getting missed is that while we have about 22 million veterans the VA is only compensating less than 4 million for disabilities.

"Veterans over the age of 50 who had entered the VA healthcare system made up about 78 percent of the total number of veterans who committed suicide"

(You do the math on that one because I already have a headache.) Then there are the attempted suicides in the military and among veterans. DOD reported for 2012

2012 Reported Suicide Attempts As of 31 March 2013, there were 869 submitted suicide attempt DoDSERs among Active duty Service members for all services in calendar year 2012. Active duty includes members of the Active component and members of the Reserve components who were in a Title 10 status at the time of the event. Since Service members could have had more than one suicide attempt during the year, the number of unique Service members and the number of DoDSERs differ. The DoDSERs described suicide attempts for 841 unique Service members: 815 with one DoDSER, 24 with two, and 2 with three. The distribution of suicide attempt DoDSERs across the services was as follows: Air Force – 26.4%, Army – 42.0%, Marine Corps – 19.4%, and Navy – 12.2%. All DoDSERs were included in the tables, figures, and summary text.

The wrong "reduction in suicides" information is out there.

“With an 18 percent drop in 2013, something is going right,” the general said. “One suicide is always too many, but we have to focus our efforts now where we think they are most needed.”

Why, because they didn't think a little detail like reduction of military folks serving also went down. According to the DOD these are the numbers from 2012 to 2014 just for an example.

2012 1,393,948
2013 1,372,336
2014 1,347,187

The myth of deployment not connected to deployments

The five-year study was undertaken in 2009, in response to the rising rate of military suicides. It's the largest study ever attempted on mental health risk and resilience among service members, and it involves an expansive partnership between the Army, the National Institute of Mental Health and several universities.

The coalition of researchers found a statistically significant rise in suicides following initial deployments. This finding contrasts sharply with a study featured in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Aug. 7 edition. Led by personnel at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, that study found no association between deployments and increased suicide risk.

That's just not the case for the Army, as depicted by Army STARRS data, said Dr. Michael Schoenbaum, collaborating scientist at NIMH.

"Soldiers who have deployed at least once do have an elevated suicide rate compared with Soldiers who never deployed," Schoenbaum said.

The AMA Journal article was based on analysis of data from the DOD Millennium Cohort Study that sampled all service members, Schoenbaum said, surmising at least half of the participants were Sailors and Airmen. In contrast, Army STARRS examines only Soldiers.

PTSD connected to military is NOT NEW and it is high time we all got that. WWI studies began on what war does to the men we send to fight.

"English Professor at Dickinson College, Wendy Moffat is writing the biography of Doctor Thomas Salmon, a civilian psychiatrist who voluntarily went to the front during WWI to study, diagnose and treat mentally broken soldiers. He's the first U.S. Army psychiatrist and the first to recognize PTSD."

Less than honorable discharges are not new. As a matter of fact they have been doing it all along however unlike the other wars when they were simply shot. Oh, don't forget the UK shot their own too. Vietnam veterans were kicked out and left with nothing.

According to the suit, approximately 250,000 Vietnam-era veterans received less-than-honorable discharges, and as many as 80,000 of those service members could be eligible for PTSD-related benefits.

As Paul Harvey used to end his radio show, "now you know the rest of the story" and it is about time they stopped trying to cover up for the fact what they have done failed the men and women with their lives in the hands of people they trusted.