Open Letter to Sen. Joe Donnelly to Open Your Eyes

UPDATE
Considering the DOD released their suicide numbers for the second quarter it pretty much proves the point DoD releases 2nd quarter suicide figures on Army Times

Suicides among active-duty service members rose by 20 percent in the second quarter of this year to 71, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Defense Department.

The Marine Corps had the highest percentage increase, 12 suicides, up from three the previous quarter.

The Army had 28 active-duty suicides, the Air Force, 17, and the Navy, 14, according to the report.

Over the first six months of 2015, 130 active-duty troops took their own lives, along with 89 reserve members and 56 National Guardsmen. In the second quarter, the reserve component experienced 47 suicides and the National Guard, 27.

Trained to Fight, Trained to Suffer in Silence
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
October 1, 2015

Suicide Prevention month is over and evidently did little good to prevent them.

I just read the headline with Donnelly Says Military Still Has Work To Do To Help Prevent Suicide and after reading about your efforts, I think you may really want to do something to save lives. Your answer is right here.

“You have to be able to ask for help – and it’s okay to ask for help," Frost said. "And that stigma that existed, really a lot in what is that Army tough, Army strong, we’re soldiers, we’re hooah…that has really started to melt away.”

I have over 30 years crammed in my brain but since we're running out of time, and frankly, I ran out of patience long ago, I will be blunt but I mean you no disrespect. I am just tied of all of this getting worse when the reason behind it was predicted back in 2009.

If you promote this (Comprehensive Solider Fitness) program the way Battlemind was promoted, count on the numbers of suicides and attempted suicides to go up instead of down. It's just one more deadly mistake after another and just as dangerous as sending them into Iraq without the armor needed to protect them.

Overwhelmed VA didn't happen overnight but then again if you fail to factor in the obvious crush of younger veterans against the already long line at the VA, this was a predictable catastrophe, or it should have been.

Wounded Times has documented all the ups and downs members of Congress have let happen. While the press seems to forget, veterans remember, especially since it is their lives we're talking about. Somehow members of Congress have managed to get away with just blaming the person in the Chair of the VA even though you've all held hearings and promised changes only to turn around every time the press reports on another crisis and veterans get more promises.

Here's a blast from the past with Senator Bernie Sanders as he and Senator Daniel Akaka were calling for more funding for the PTSD Center Funding. It came out in 2008, a year after Congress had the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill passed and signed into law in 2007.

In recent years, the Center for PTSD has been called on to dramatically expand its mission and conduct research on a larger scale. At the same time, an increasing number of servicemembers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD. However, the Center's budget has increased by less than 10 percent in the past half-decade. Due to limited funding, the Center's capacity to continue its work is severely restricted, and staff levels have been reduced since 1999.

While all of you were blaming Shinseki, veterans noticed this going on,

In a departure from the rhetoric Shinseki has used before Congress, Shinseki said at the American Legion's National Convention that he's not afraid of the claims backlog that has grown to about 600,000 -- a sore point when Senators and Congressmen question him on Capitol Hill. The VA secretary said he doesn't regret opening the opportunity to issue disability claims to nearly a million veterans of wars going back more than 60 years. He only wishes the decision had been made sooner to give the VA a head start.

We also remember this, Obama to order VA to add staff, see suicidal vets within 24 hours from Stars and Stripes reporter Megan McCloskey on August 30, 2012

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will sign an executive order Friday directing the Department of Veterans Affairs to expand mental health services and suicide prevention efforts. The president will make the announcement in a speech to troops at Fort Bliss, Texas, where he’ll also hold a roundtable with soldiers and their families. Much of what's outlined in the executive order are initiatives that were previously announced earlier this summer by the VA. Obama is instructing the VA to ensure that any veteran with suicidal thoughts is seen by a mental health professional within 24 hours -- a standard already set for the VA, but which the department often fails to meet. The VA has until June 2013 to figure out how to fix that issue with pay, loan repayment, scholarships and partnerships with community-based providers and training programs. The goal, announced by the VA in June, is to hire 1,900 mental health staffers.

The VA is also being told to increase the veteran crisis hotline capacity by 50 percent by the end of year and to develop a national 12-month suicide prevention campaign that would help connect veterans to mental health services.

The president ordered the Pentagon to review and rank its mental health and substance abuse prevention programs by quality and effectiveness. “By the end of Fiscal Year 2014, existing program resources shall be realigned to ensure that highly ranked programs are implemented across all of the military services and less effective programs are replaced,” the order states. That forces the Pentagon to take ownership of the programs military-wide instead of allowing each service to decide on its own what programs to use. Reviewing the vast and disparate programs will be a big task and could lead to kickback from the services, which are protective of their programs.

In addition, the president is convening a Military and Veterans Mental Health Interagency Task Force to present him with recommendations in 180 days on how to improve treatment services.

We also knew that the Pentagon hadn't even spent the money they were already given to prevent suicides and that came out during a U.S. House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing a month after President Obama made his announcement.

In July, the McDermott-Boswell amendment that would increase critical funding for suicide prevention for active duty military by $10 million passed with strong support in the House Defense Appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2013.

“The Pentagon hasn’t spent the money that it has for suicide prevention for this year – and that money wasn’t nearly enough money to reach all the soldiers who need help. Now we are hearing about bureaucratic technicalities at the Pentagon that are preventing them from acting. This is unconscionable,” said Congressman McDermott. “The Pentagon is funded to help soldiers and needs to do much more on the epidemic of suicides. As we commemorate National Suicide Prevention Week, we are calling on the Pentagon to move much faster.”

So we've been watching and waiting for our elected officials to wake up and change what has been proven to be wrong. We keep reading about this bill and that bill while veterans pay the price for their service as they get speeches. Enough it enough! Before you try another attempt at writing yet one more bill, ask yourself "Why it has gotten worse as Congress has done more than ever before?" and then toss in the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of charities all over the country collecting billions a year after veterans did everything possible to make it home from war alive but cannot survive right here at home.

Want to remove the stigma of PTSD? Then get to the original problem. Some yahoo decided a research project designed to give school aged children a better sense of self worth would be just fine and dandy for service members. That is what Comprehensive Soldier Fitness was. Take and look at what RAND Corp had to say about this and then hold folks accountable for doing it. Dark Side of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness

There seems to be reluctance and inconsistency among the CSF promoters in acknowledging that CSF is "research" and therefore should entail certain protections routinely granted to those who participate in research studies. Seligman explained to the APA's Monitor on Psychology (link is external), "This is the largest study - 1.1 million soldiers - psychology has ever been involved in" (a "study" is a common synonym for "research project"). But when asked during an NPR interview (link is external) whether CSF would be "the largest-ever experiment," Brig. Gen. Cornum, who oversees the program, responded, "Well, we're not describing it as an experiment. We're describing it as training." Despite the fact that CSF is incontrovertibly a research study, standard and important questions about experimental interventions like CSF are neither asked nor answered in the special issue. This neglect is all the more troubling given that the program is so massive and expensive, and the stakes are so high.

We also know this,

The Defense Department runs 900 suicide prevention programs, yet the number of military suicides has more than doubled since 2001, the head of the Pentagon’s suicide prevention office told lawmakers Thursday.

Jacqueline Garrick, acting director of the Defense Suicide Prevention Office, told the House Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon has identified 291 suicides in fiscal 2012 with investigations into another 59 pending. This is up from 160 in 2001. She said the suicide rate for 2012 is expected to increase once death investigations have been completed and a final manner of death determination is issued.

When suicides went up instead of down, it would have been helpful if you guys started to ask why what you already failed before you just did more of it.

The worst thing is none of you seemed to notice that for veterans in general, they are double the civilian population rate, which is really bad, but when they looked at the percentages for younger veterans, the ones who got that "training" their rate was triple their peer rate.

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, according to a federal study released Friday. Former troops in that high-risk age group — who were also enrolled for care at veterans' hospitals — posted a suicide rate of 79.1 per 100,000 during 2011, the latest data available. In contrast, the annual suicide rate for all American males has recently averaged about 25 per 100,000, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports. During 2009, the suicide rate for veterans 24 and younger was 46.1 per 100,000 — meaning the deadly pace increased by 79 percent during that two-year span.

Seems like one of your staffers should have paid attention to all of this since we did.

Anyone can get PTSD after trauma, but not everyone went into traumatic events willingly. They put their lives on the line for each other but couldn't talk to each other about needing help to heal from it. That is the real problem behind all of it. They were trained that way.