Military Suicide Awareness Different From Our Reality

Suicide Awareness Misses Our Reality
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 23, 2015

There are two vastly different conversations going on in the US today. One is what civilians repeat after reading the news and the other is what the veterans community talks about after having lived what reports write about.

Well meaning folks think they can raise awareness about what we live with without taking the time to even talk to us. Good intentions have very bad results. All the talk about how many veterans commit suicide in this country everyday mislead the rest of the country about what our reality is. Our reality is veterans commit suicide double the civilian rate and most are over the age of 50. You know, the veterans the media is no longer interested in and all the popup charities won't even talk to.

In 2007 CBS News had a headline Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans and in that article a study CBS News asked for,

It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets.

Since the report focused on OEF and OIF suicides, no one thought about the older veterans. As bad as all that was, what researchers focused on OEF and OIF veterans they found their rate of suicide was triple their civilian peer rate. What was not reported on is the simple fact, nothing has changed since then other than there are more in the total count of losses we grieve for.

The suicide rate among young male veterans continues to soar: ex-servicemen 24 and younger are now three times more likely than civilian males to take their lives,

Female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women, new research showed but when they factored in the younger female veterans

The rates are highest among young veterans, the VA found in new research compiling 11 years of data. For women ages 18 to 29, veterans kill themselves at nearly 12 times the rate of nonveterans.

But even that report had some wrong information

Male veterans 50 and older — the vast majority of whom served during the draft era, which ended in 1973 — had roughly the same suicide rates as nonveteran men their age. Only younger male veterans, who served in the all-volunteer force, had rates that exceeded those of other men.

For every death families also pay the price.

They survived the hell that's Iraq and then they come home only to lose their life.

Twenty-three-year-old Marine Reservist Jeff Lucey hanged himself with a garden hose in the cellar of this parents' home - where his father, Kevin, found him.

"There's a crisis going on and people are just turning the other way," Kevin Lucey said.

Kim and Mike Bowman's son Tim was an Army reservist who patrolled one of the most dangerous places in Baghdad, known as Airport Road.

"His eyes when he came back were just dead. The light wasn't there anymore," Kim Bowman said.

Eight months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Tim shot himself. He was 23.

Diana Henderson's son, Derek, served three tours of duty in Iraq. He died jumping off a bridge at 27.

"Going to that morgue and seeing my baby ... my life will never be the same," she said.

2012

Across the DoD Active Duty and Selected Reserve population, there are 2,228,348 military personnel and 3,066,717 family members, including spouses, children, and adult dependents.

And we wait.  We live with what the DOD is doing and wait for them to understand they need to change everything.  We wait for their excuses to end and for them to stop blaming everything on the soldiers and their families.  We wait for them to explain how it is the number of deaths by suicides went up after all the money had been spent to prevent them. Still waiting for them to explain how their psychological testing for all recruits missed all the "existing mental health problems they consistently want to hide behind. Wait for them to explain how they expected Comprehensive Soldier Fitness to work on those deployed if it didn't even work for the non-deployed.

We wait for Congress to actually start holding people accountable for all this and stop writing bills that have absolutely nothing to do with saving our family members while they call on us to tell stories of our anguish over and over again.

Those are the numbers we live with. They are our husbands, wives, sons, daughters, Dads and Moms. They are our family. Each one suffering has a family suffering as well. Each time a veteran commits suicide, they leave behind a grieving family, friends and too often unreported on, their military family reading about their suicide long after they willingly risked their lives.

We know that PTSD is tied to most of the lives we lost and pray to God they finally figure out that they are survivors of combat and survive Combat PTSD undefeated because they can heal. None of them are stuck the way they are today and they can change again. That can only happen if our voices are heard loud and clear.

For current military members, we also live with reality of what the number of suicide deaths really mean.

US military suicide rate stable high for 5 years, RT News, Published time: 14 Jan, 2015 seemed like a good article but they got this wrong.

The number of active-duty personnel committing suicide has fallen from its highest level of 352 in 2009.

This is from the DOD Suicide Event Report for 2012

According to AFMES data as of 31 March 2013, there were 319 suicides among Active component Service members and 203 among Reserve component Services members

319 + 203 is 522.

Also in the same report

A total of 841 Service members had one or more attempted suicides

By the time the 2013 Suicide Event Report came out

According to AFMES’s data as of June 30, 2014, there were 259 suicides among Active Component SMs and 220 among Reserve and National Guard SMs of the Selected Reserve

259 + 220 is 479

And in the same report

A total of 1,034 SMs had one or more attempted suicides reported in the DoDSER for CY 2013.

The general data suggests the number of suicides is growing in the Navy from 43 to 58 in 2013-2014, and in the Air Force 52 to 60; there has been a decline in suicides in the Army from 146 to 135, as well as in the Marines 45 to 35.

As bad as all that seems to be in January of 2014 KFOX News of Texas reported this stunning fact.

The Department of Veterans Affairs recently released a report that shows suicides among young veterans just getting out of the military are three times higher than active-duty soldiers

This is all the result from this.

PENTAGON SPENT OVER $4 BILLION ON MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT BETWEEN 2007 AND 2012 The Congressional Research Service just put a price tag on the mental health costs of the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: about $4.5 billion between 2007 and 2012. The Defense Department spent $958 million on mental health treatment in 2012, roughly double the $468 million it spent in 2007.

Eighty-nine percent of spending on mental disorder treatment between 2007 and 2012 -- approximately $4 billion -- went for active duty service members. Over the same time frame, the military health system spent about $461 million on mental health care treatment for activated Guard and Reserve members.

Of the nearly $1 billion the military medical system spent in fiscal 2012 on mental disorder treatments for active duty and activated National Guard and reserve members, CRS said more than half of the costs, about $567 million, were for outpatient active duty mental health care.

After all that money was spent the number of enlisted suicides went up and so did the number of younger veterans given the training to survive.

When civilians read about what the DOD is doing on "prevention" they think they are trying but when we read about what the DOD is doing, we live with the reality of the price being paid for their failures. We live with the risk to their lives during service as more and more commit suicide with less serving.

The War in Iraq ended in 2011 yet the number of suicides went up in 2012. According to the Department of Defense the total number of active duty members had been,

2005 1,412,895
2010 1,458,697
2011 1,453,436
2012 1,429,877

Proving as the number of suicides went up the number of enlisted went down but the press hasn't paid much attention to that either.  Those numbers matter to us but the rest of the county keeps talking about 22 a day as if it that was the truth.  They want to raise awareness about something they don't understand and that, that is the reality we live with everyday.