Death by Suicide is Expensive

Forgotten in all the reports on veterans committing suicide are Vietnam veterans Suicide Rate Spikes in Vietnam Vets Who Won't Seek Help

But suicide rates among Vietnam veterans are the highest of any particular group, according to John Draper, project director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

In 2007 CBS News did a report showing the high number of suicides after contacting all 50 states and when information was not already collected, CBS paid to cover the cost of doing it.
Veteran Suicides: How We Got The Numbers

Results 2004
Overall Rates
Veterans: 17.5 to 21.8 per 100,000
Non-Veterans: 9.4 per 100,000
Male Rates
Veterans: 30.6 to 38.3 per 100,000
Non-Veterans: 18.3 per 100,000
Female Rates
Veterans: 10.0 to 12.5 per 100,000
Non-Veterans: 4.8 per 100,000

Results 2005
Overall Rates
Veterans: 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000
Non-Veterans: 8.9 per 100,000
Male Rates
Veterans: 31.5 to 35.3 per 100,000
Non-Veterans: 17.6 per 100,000
Female Rates
Veterans: 11.1 to 12.3 per 100,000
Non-Veterans: 4.5 per 100,000

And then there were more we didn't talk about. Attempted suicides within the records of the VA.

"This 12,000 attempted suicides per year shows clearly, without a doubt, that there is an epidemic of suicide among veterans," said Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense.

But that report didn't come out this year. Or last year. That report was made public because of a lawsuit filed way back in 2008.

The media has to stop pushing the "22 a day" claim made and start reporting the truth! Yet another report out of Washington tied marijuana to a report on veterans committing suicide.

Olympia Hempfest offers high times all weekend at Heritage Park

"The dispensary also hosts a support group for veterans called Twenty22Many (pronounced “twenty-two too many”), which has a visible presence at this year’s Olympia Hempfest. The group was started in response to a report that an average of 22 veterans commit suicide daily because of issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder."

Which is really ironic considering a couple of paragraphs above that one was this.

"Attending her first Hempfest was Anne Sulton, co-owner of A Bud and Leaf, one of two recreational marijuana retailers in Olympia. She was impressed by the peaceful crowd and said the event embodies an expression of freedom that Americans often take for granted."

A lot of people are taking those who served for granted.

Just because the media claims "freedom of the press" that does not mean they should have the freedom to push rumors.

We know the numbers are a lot higher and it is time the truth mattered simply because the numbers went up after the media decided it was a good topic to cover.

Charities popped up all over the country and congress spent more money on "awareness" and "prevention" when it turned out that veterans were preventned from healing and living better lives.

Suffering veterans turned into a billion dollar industry and funeral homes saw business booming. In other words, they became merchants of death. When more veterans committed suicide they became a price paid for our ignorance.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been "dealing" with PTSD veterans for 4 decades yet someone decided only the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan mattered. Why? Because the press hardly ever bothers to tell the stories of older veterans suffering longer with less help for the same wounds the new generation is getting attention for.

The answer is obvious. Reporters are focusing on what is easy, social media. They are assigned stories to cover, don't take the time or don't get the time to do real research, so they opt out of fact gathering and search for what is popular on Facebook and Twitter.

So who do we get to blame for all of this? US! If we don't start to hold them accountable for correcting the rumors, veterans will still keep paying the price for charities raising funds about wrong "awareness" as congress spends more and more money on what does not work.

We've all heard about sequestration and the cuts in government spending,,,or so we were told. Yet that is not what Congress ended up doing.

Mental Health Programs See Increases in FY 2014 Funding; $1.012 Trillion Package Provides Relief from Sequestration

The budget plan increases spending to $1.012 trillion in 2014 and $1.014 in 2015—up from the $967 billion required by the across-the-board sequester cuts. It provides for about $63 billion in sequester relief, divided equally among defense and non-defense programs.

The spending package includes $1.1 billion for mental health programs, which is $136 million more than the 2013 enacted level. NIMH will receive $1.45 billion, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) will receive $1.03 billion and SAMHSA will receive $3.63 billion. In addition, the spending plan provides the first meaningful increase in funding for the Center for Mental Health Services.

Troops were discharged after sequestration kicked in and the defense budget for servicemembers shrunk. The funds for "prevention" programs that did not work did not get cut because more service members were still committing suicide and they needed the money to continue to push the programs that already were proven failures. Does that make sense to you?

The VA suicide report put the number at 22 a day with the disclaimer the data was limited based on 21 states. All veterans are not in the VA system, so they did could not track all the suicides tied to military service. Even within their own system they found there were 12,000 attempted suicides every year.

Death by suicide is expensive. Healing is less profitable but a hell of a lot more remarkable!

USA Today did a report on suicide stating there is an American committing suicide every 13 minutes.

The nearly 40,000 American lives lost each year make suicide the nation's 10th-leading cause of death, and the second-leading killer for those ages 15-34. Each suicide costs society about $1 million in medical and lost-work expenses and emotionally victimizes an average of 10 other people.

Only in one area did Americans react to suicide. When soldiers started killing themselves in record numbers during two arguably unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a groundswell from the public and Congress drove the military to respond.

The Army suicide rate tripled from 2004 and 2012 as more than 2,000 GIs took their lives. A new RAND study says that since 2005, about $230 million was poured into suicide research, more than two-thirds of it from the military.

"All the military research is likely to benefit civilians as well," says Michelle Cornette, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology.

A centerpiece effort is a $65 million study — the cost split between the Army and NIH — analyzing soldier suicides and tracking tens of thousands of troops over a period of years to understand self-destructive urges.

National Institutes of Health Estimates of Funding for Various Research, Condition, and Disease Categories (RCDC) Table Published: February 5, 2015
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
$0 2011
$0 2012
$77 2013
$79 2014
$79 2015
$81 2016

Suicide
$49 2011
$44 2012
$37 2013
$39 2014
$39 2015
$40 2016

Suicide Prevention
$25 2011
$22 2012
$21 2013
$22 2014
$22 2015
$22 2016

Yes those numbers are in the millions.

For all the money spent and all the information gathered the result is more veterans are dying after all the "awareness" made less veterans aware of what they needed to heal.

This is even more troubling when you factor in that all the research on combat related PTSD began with Vietnam coming home and pushing for it.
Suicide Wall

In its efforts to help these veterans, the 700,000-member Disabled American Veterans (DAV) funded the FORGOTTEN WARRIOR PROJECT research on Vietnam veterans by John P. Wilson, Ph.D. at Cleveland State University. That research resulted in formation of the DAV Vietnam Veterans Outreach Program to provide counseling to these veterans in 1978. With 70 outreach offices across the United States, this DAV program served as a model for the Veterans Administration (VA) Operation Outreach program for Vietnam era veterans, which was established approximately a year later.

I still have the pamphlet hanging on my wall.

Just goes to show that intervention happened but did more harm than good, yet we allowed everyone to do everything they wanted instead of what was needed. No one was ever held accountable when it all got worse. Americans wrote checks to charities raising awareness for a selected group of veterans leaving far too many still suffering longer and dying younger. No one paid the price for our ignorance but veterans and their families.