Suicide Awareness, DOD Sucks At Saving Lives

When it comes to Suicide Awareness Month there isn't much the DOD is aware of! How about they start with they still suck at saving lives?

Before heading to work this morning I was reading How the Army is Unlocking Soldier Suicide and knew if I didn't shut down the computer half way through it, I'd have to call in sick.

That's the trouble with starting work at 6:00 am and it really pissed me off reading the same old garbage after reading years of "1 suicide is too many" followed by far more than one, more than a hundred but numbers into the hundreds of current military and thousands of veterans every year.

Enough of the bullshit! Empty slogans don't save lives but they still don't get it. They don't get much at all and Congress continues to just write checks, hold worthless hearings dragging grieving families to Washington making them promises they have no clue how to deliver on.

In 2007 the headline was Army Suicides Highest in 26 Years reported by Associate Press and these were the numbers they were worried about.

The 99 suicides included 28 soldiers deployed to the two wars and 71 who weren't.

Joshua Omvig's parents thought his death was "1 too many" and they traveled to Washington to make sure Congress did something about saving other families from experiencing the same anguish. Congress said they listened and the Bill they wrote with Joshua's name on it came with a price tag. Not just financially but the price was more years with more dying every year by their own hands.

Senator Murray used her position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to fight for $900 million towards research for the invisible wounds of war like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in the fiscal year (FY) 2007 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill. This bill also included $100 million for mental health services.

Senator Murray coauthored and fought to pass the Dignified Treatment of Wounded Warriors Act as part of the FY 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, and she made sure that the key provisions of the bill were funded in the FY 2008 Defense Appropriations bill. The Wounded Warriors Act increased coordination between the military and the VA for treating returning troops and veterans with mental health issues. These steps will help servicemembers and veterans access mental health care to improve their quality of life.

Senator Murray was very troubled by news reports that revealed the shocking numbers of veterans committing suicide. The veteran population suffers from suicide at twice the rate as the American civilian population. Veterans between the ages of 20 and 24, who are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have a suicide rate two to four times higher than their civilian counterparts.

To address this, Senator Murray worked tirelessly with her colleagues in Congress to pass the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Act into law. The bill improves the VA’s suicide prevention procedures by requiring mental health training for VA staff and screening for suicide risk factors for veterans who receive VA care. The law also designates a suicide prevention counselor at each VA medical facility.

It was signed in 2007 by President Bush.

But less than a year later Associated Press reported that "Most vet suicides among Guard and Reserve troops"

WASHINGTON — More than half of all veterans who took their own lives after returning from Iraq or Afghanistan were members of the National Guard or Reserves, according to new government data that prompted activists on Tuesday to call for a closer examination of the problem.

A Department of Veterans Affairs analysis of ongoing research of deaths among veterans of both wars — obtained by The Associated Press — found that Guard or Reserve members accounted for 53 percent of the veteran suicides from 2001, when the war in Afghanistan began, through the end of 2005.

Last year, the Army said its suicide rate in 2006 rose to 17.3 per 100,000 troops, the highest level in 26 years of record-keeping. The Army said recently that as many as 121 soldiers committed suicide last year. If all are confirmed, the number would be more than double the number reported in 2001.

In October, the AP reported that preliminary VA research found that from the start of the war in Afghanistan in October 2001 and the end of 2005, a total of 283 troops who had served in the wars and later were discharged from the military had committed suicide.

After almost 25,000 posts on Wounded Times, you know I could just keep going on all of this but I won't. It is just too damn infuriating to even try. How is it that I could figure this out back in 2009 and the DOD hasn't?

Back to the recent report.

“We probably went into this thinking in terms of ‘war is hell,’ and if you send people to war, then bad things happen to those people. But the suicide rate rose as much in soldiers who had not ever been deployed as it did in those who did,” says Dr. Michael Schoenbaum, senior advisor for mental health services, epidemiology and economics at NIMH’s Office of Science Policy, Planning and Communications.

They have a habit of pointing that out however fail to remind anyone they have invested billions into prevention that couldn't even stop non-deployed from committing suicide. How the hell did they expect it to work on those deployed over and over again?

Schoenbaum was also a scientific principal for the STARRS study, which began in 2009 with $50 million in funding from the Army under the leadership of then-secretary Pete Geren. Initially planned as a five-year effort to study risk and protective factors for suicidality within the Army, the program received a one-year, no-cost extension, which expired in June.

So we are left with more suicides in the military with less serving, one more thing they failed to point out, along with more veterans committing suicide. No one held accountable? No one had to give back the money they made off "prevention" when they just prevented them from living?

I know, lets just fund another study to figure out why they other studies didn't teach them a damn thing!