Military Suicide Prevention Begins with End of What Failed Them

We need to be honest for a change if things will ever change for our veterans. This bill does not do anything that has not already been done before and suicides went up. They went up after the Senator Obama went to the Montana National Guard in 2008 and promised to do everything possible to save lives. Suicides within the military and among veterans went up but it was more of the repeated bills like the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention bill of 2007.

When people write editorials like this it would be more helpful to report the actual history of subjects as serious as this.

Veterans are double the population for suicides while for younger veterans, after all the military "prevention efforts" started, they are now triple the rate of their peers. Vietnam veterans pushed for all the research and programs and that makes these outcomes all the more troubling considering they started pushing in the 70's.

Anti-suicide effort needed for all vets
EXPRESS-NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD
FEBRUARY 22, 2015

The suicide epidemic among veterans is a national tragedy, one that should be commanding our full attention. It is an epidemic that affects veterans of all ages and wars, and it is not simply bound to those who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, a new study on this tragedy found an annual suicide rate for veterans that was 50 percent higher than the civilian population. The study tracked every veteran who served in active-duty units between 2001 and 2007 and also left the military in that time period. It followed these veterans through 2009, determining there were 1,868 suicides.

That meant a suicide rate of 29.5 per 100,000 veterans, which is significantly higher than the civilian population. But that is hardly surprising, unfortunately. Perhaps more compelling, the study’s findings highlighted the complexities of this tragic issue. Despite popular perception, the suicide rate was slightly higher for veterans who never deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Lets start with that claim.

The military does physical and psychological testing for every recruit. If they were suffering from any mental health issues before enlisting, then the tests failed if this is true. In other words, the military has been incompetent.

Staying they were not deployed also showed that the suicide prevention efforts were also incompetent if they were so inadequate even non-deployed service members found living impossible and committed suicide.

How any reasonable leader would expect Comprehensive Soldier Fitness to work on the deployed as well as multiply deployed, when it didn't even work on non-deployed, shows more incompetence.

And exactly what price did any of these leaders have to pay for their failures? They paid no price at all while suicides within the military went up and the numbers of deployed into two war zones went down.

What is the most delusional of all is the suicide rate of the younger soldiers the military no longer have to count has gone up as well.

Delusional
Psychiatry. maintaining fixed false beliefs even when confronted with facts, usually as a result of mental illness:

Taking a look at the fact that discovering a recruit had made a mistake in enlisting, it isn't as if they can just quit and move onto something else. The discharge stays with them the rest of their lives.

College students change their majors all the time, but they just do some paperwork.

Some students go to college knowing exactly what they want to do. But most don’t. At Penn State, 80 percent of freshmen — even those who have declared a major — say they are uncertain about their major, and half will change their minds after they declare, sometimes more than once.

Quitting the military

Joining the military is not like getting a job a McDonalds™. You can't simply quit because you don't like it. You signed a contract, and you took an oath, and you are legally (and morally) obligated to complete the terms of the contract, even if you don't like it.

And then there is the discharge that will be part of them the rest of their lives.

Under Other Than Honorable Conditions (UOTHC). This is the worst service characterization that can be given for an administrative discharge. It means that the servicemember did not meet the expected levels of conduct and/or performance required of military members. Usually, a person with an UOTHC discharge is not eligible for veteran benefits, but the actual decision is made on a case-by-case basis by the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA).

There you have part of the problem when the military talks about "non-deployed" committing suicide. Top that off again with their "resilience training" causing more of a trainwreck, you get the idea.

Then full swing back to what is happening to our veterans. We've heard it all before. They passed the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill and then a huge stack of others just like it so some senator from a district can act like he/she cares so they can turn around and gain some votes from veterans. Nice trick but veterans notice when they've been lied to and let down.

Reporters, well, hell, if they can jump on something that is popular then great gain for them and a lot easier than exposing the massive failures that created more and more veterans with their names on bills as well as the tombstone.

Clay Hunt committed suicide long after all the other bills were passed and paid for by taxpayers as well as the other veterans who committed suicide because they didn't have the help they were promised to train well enough to survive stateside.

We have to waste time on fixing what they got wrong all these years or what they've gotten right won't work for as many veterans needing help to heal.

The VA has some really great programs going for them from outreach efforts online to Yoga, meditation, nutrition, support groups, one on one therapy and telehealth. What do we talk about? We have to talk about what they got wrong so that part gets fixed too.

When it comes to PTSD, they've been working on that for generations. No one seems to be able to explain how so many veterans have fallen into the abyss at the same time.

Peer Support works best, yet if the peer only knows as much as the veteran in pain, it sucks hope out of the room. Peer support is yet one more effort the politicians have patted themselves on the back for, but in the case of New York, they actually got it right under the PFC Joseph Dwyer PTSD Peer-to-Peer Veterans Counseling Program.

`Veterans' Mental Health Outreach and Access Act of 2007 pretty much sums up how long that has been talked about. Peer support was also in the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Act.

The lesson here is a simple one. Fix what is broken so that what works is able to work. Unless we do this, we'll see more veterans suffering instead of healing and more politicians putting names of the dead on bills they've already done.