Stopping Veterans From Committing Suicide Requires Facts First

When Nothing Changes, We Need To
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
July 9, 2016

While folks want to run around the country screaming about "22 a day" few are actually doing much to change the outcome on veterans taking their own lives.

I get the phone calls and email all the time about this group and that group deciding they are need to change what is happening yet when asked, they cannot even answer basic questions.

The only question I am earnestly seeking an answer to is, if everyone is doing something about veterans committing suicide, then why are there more suicides with less veterans? None of them know the answer but even worse, none of them have actually even considered the question important enough to think about.
Most suicides by U.S. veterans are by those over age 50: study was reported on Reuters by Alex Dobuzinskins.

"Of the veterans known to have committed suicide in 2014, the latest year for which such data was available, 65 percent were at least 50 years of age, old enough to have served in the 1990-91 Gulf War, the Vietnam War or previous conflicts."

While this is not news to most of us, it is news to the majority of reporters pushing the reports on suicides leaving far too many to just jump on "22 a day" so they can pretend to be doing something to change the outcomes.

We have seen it all coming out of Washington when politicians get publicity for writing a bill that simply repeats what they already passed and paid for just as more and more veterans managed to pay with their lives.  So far, after over a decade of misguided efforts the amount of money is in the billions and the deaths by suicides are in the thousands.

As more veterans charities raise funds we need to know what the results are. We have seen in in groups popping up all over the country claiming to be doing something to change the end for our veterans.

A Donor's Guide to Serving the Needs of Veterans and the Military "Donors who want to make contributions towards charitable programs that serve the military and veterans face an almost overwhelming volume of choices with, by some accounts, the existence of over 40,000 nonprofit organizations dedicated to serving the military and veterans and an estimated 400,000 service organizations that in some way touch veterans or service members.

Even the 2013/2014 Directory of Veterans and Military Service Organizations published by the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs as an informational service for veterans seeking support lists over 140 national nonprofit organizations. Additionally, the number of new veterans charities has increased relatively rapidly over the past five years or so, growing by 41% since 2008 compared with 19% for charities in general, according to The Urban Institute as reported in a December 2013 The NonProfit Times article.

As bad as all that sounds, the truth is so much worse.

In 1999 the Department of Veterans Affairs showed that 20 veterans were committing suicide per day. It is being reported at the same number today. 

In 1977 the Forgotten Warrior Project reported on what was happening to Vietnam veterans and all the other generations before them.  It was not good. But back then, everyone had excuses to not know anything about it.  We did not have the internet. I did not know anything about any of this until my Dad (Korean Veteran) met my then Vietnam Veteran boyfriend and used the words "shell shock." That was in 1982.

We are right back to where we started with less veterans.

Census 2000 counted 208.1 million civilians 18 and older in the United States. Within this population, approximately 26.4 million or 12.7 percent were veterans. Census data define a civilian veteran as someone 18 and older who is not currently on active duty, but who once served on active duty in the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard, or who served in the Merchant Marine during World War II.2 This definition includes people who served for even a short time.

And for 2013 according to the US Census the number of veterans were in fact lower.

19.6 million
Number of military veterans in the United States in 2013.
Source: 2013 American Community Survey

Almost 7 million less veterans but still the VA says there are the same amount of veterans committing suicide?

How can any of this be acceptable to anyone? When do we actually wake up to the reality families face all over the country while a slogan is all folks need to use while we suffer and bury our family members? When do we actually do something beyond cry?

Internet Left PTSD Pioneers Behind

PTSD Pioneers Paved The Way We Lost
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
March 19, 2016

There was a time in this country when what was learned came from a library stocked with hardcover books written by experts in their fields along with a magical key containing meanings of words they used called a dictionary. That's how I learned about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and what combat did in all the generations of war fighters. 

My Dad was a Korean War veteran and my uncles fought during WWII.  I heard a lot of stories growing up but there was one term I had not heard until the night my Dad met my then boyfriend, a Vietnam veteran.  He said "Well, he seems like a nice guy but he's got shell shock."

I asked my Dad to explain it but he couldn't, so I went to the library and began to understand PTSD so that I could understand this man I had fallen in love with.

That time was almost 34 years ago. 

It was also a time when others had laid the maps of how the human mind worked years ahead of the first time I heard about any of it.

Forgotten Warrior Project: Identity, Ideology and Crisis - The Vietnam Veteran in Transition Paperback – 1977 by John P. Ph.D. Wilson was written when I was in still in highschool.

CSU professor John P. Wilson, 69, was pioneering PTSD expert
The Plain Dealer
By Tom Feran
July 09, 2015

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- John P. Wilson, an internationally recognized expert on post-traumatic stress disorder who was a pioneer in its identification and treatment, died at home on Monday. He was 69 and a resident of East Cleveland.

Retired since 2013 as a psychology professor at Cleveland State University, he was revered within his specialty and held in particular regard by Vietnam War veterans.

His "Forgotten Warrior" project, initiated in 1976 -- years before PTSD was defined as a psychiatric diagnosis -- was one of the first formal studies of returning Vietnam veterans. Presented in testimony before the U.S. Senate, it led to a comprehensive stress inventory of veterans and a Veterans Administration counseling program.

Wilson started the project after coming to CSU in 1973 and finding classrooms teeming with Vietnam veterans who told of problems sleeping, of nightmares and of flashbacks from the war. The work earned him a commendation from President Jimmy Carter. His expertise put him in demand.
read more here

The Forgotten Warrior Project led to Readjustment Problems Among Vietnam Veterans: The Etiology of Combat-related Post-traumatic Stress Disorders by Jim Goodwin Psy.D in 1981. I have a copy of the pamphlet from the DAV hanging on my wall as a reminder of those I learned from, what we knew for decades and how little is remembered today.

We have forgotten how much was being done on PTSD because far too many folks have been getting the attention for doing a lot of talking but very little researching.

Janis Joplin sang about feeling good being good enough,

And, feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues. You know, feelin' good was good enough for me.

How did we end up with having the ability to know even more now about PTSD yet knowing so much less? Is it more about feeling good about thinking we're doing some good or actually doing good with good results?

From what I see, there are far too many doing something that makes them feel good as long as they don't have to actually do the work to help veterans understand the problems they face are more due to the lack of efforts from others and not something the veterans are lacking within themselves.

I lost count on how many of the conversations I've had with folks thinking that they are the ones to change what is happening to veterans with their claims of raising awareness, yet failed to even bother to do the research to know anything worthy of making veterans aware of anything beyond the fact they want their money.

Best case out there is what we saw when millions of Americans opened their checkbooks to donate to a famous group with very little being said on what they were planning on doing with the money they were given.  Hey, it felt good to write a check and then get back to their own lives, so nothing else really mattered until CBS did a report about them and then hell fell on the heads of the charity.  They only got away with it because other reporters failed to spend anytime checking them out before they were publicized.

The founder started it with a simply mission and that was supplying backpacks to wounded service members in the hospital.

“They did good work for a long time, but organizations need a conscience. I think in my tenure, while I was there, I was the conscience of the organization.” John Melia

It isn't as if they were the only ones raising awareness for themselves while veterans we left behind. We're seeing that in every state as more and more folks learn about PTSD from a simple internet search without ever doing the real research into what has been done that worked.

So what are they looking for? Some way of deluding themselves into thinking they are the ones to fix it without having to invest the time in understanding any of this? Seriously?

We keep hearing about the VA Suicide Study and what the reporters snagged on as "22 a day" because reading page 14 was just too hard to report on. You'd think that something as serious as veterans surviving combat yet ending their own lives back home would require some serious thought and reporting but hey, it was "just a number" after all, so why bother?

The technology we have today is fabulous but the users fail to understand that none of this is new and it won't improve until they actually get serious about knowing what they are talking about before they start screaming about how much good they can do when they haven't even bothered to learn from the pioneers who mapped all the roads toward healing because they were tired of the road that led to failure.

My generation had to learn the hard way but we learned the best way simply because others were out there doing all the work for the right reasons.  The experts I learned from helped me save my marriage and a lot of lives afterwards.  Everything I know was because I learned from them and by living with PTSD all these years.  We've been married for over 32 years!

Wish I could say the same about all the folks out there wanting publicity over wanting to actually do something they didn't even care enough about to learn the facts because that would just take too much time.

Veterans ran out of time because feeling too was just too easy for those who claimed to be helping instead of doing more harm than good.

They’re crying out for help. But will anyone listen?

He Cries Alone: Black Men and PTSD
The Root
BY: ERICKA BLOUNT DANOIS
Posted: May 24 2015

Whether they are veterans or victims of violence, black men are less likely to seek the help they need when they have post-traumatic stress disorder.

They’re crying out for help. But will anyone listen?

They are African-American men, struggling with mental illness and post-traumatic stress disorder—many are veterans, but many more are civilians struggling in secret, ashamed.

These are men like 26-year-old James Brown. Brown served two tours in Iraq. When he returned home he was diagnosed with PTSD. He ended up going to jail for a court-appointed sentence in 2012 in El Paso, Texas. That’s where several guards reportedly detained him in riot gear and forced him to the ground. He began bleeding through the ears, nose and mouth and his kidneys shut down. According to media reports, the guards did not order medical attention for him. He went into the jail on a Friday. By Sunday, he was dead.

Brown’s case, which is still pending investigation, points to many issues surrounding PTSD, the criminalization of mental health as it relates to black communities and disparities in treatment. PTSD severely affects people’s chances of gaining and maintaining steady employment. According to the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans, on any given night, nearly 50,000 veterans are homeless and roughly 40 percent of those homeless veterans are African American or Hispanic.

“It wasn’t until 1979, that PTSD became a legitimate mental health diagnosis,” Ron Armstead tells The Root. Armstead works with the Black Caucus Veterans Brain Trust to level disparities for black veterans. “Prior to 1979, there were problems targeting PTSD as a legitimate diagnosis. There still isn’t a silver bullet treatment for it. But there are a variety of treatment modalities that people are using.”

The issues surrounding PTSD and diagnosis are compounded by health disparities in African-American communities. Many African-American men are reluctant to go to the doctor because of misdiagnosis or mistreatment. There is also the perceived weakness surrounding asking for help for men. Armstead says many men may not see PTSD as something for which one even go to the doctor.
read more here

Here is the story of Sgt. James Brown and as you just read, he did seek help for PTSD.

As for the claim of 1979 and the "legitimate mental health diagnosis" that is wrong. It happened before that year and there were already established efforts to address it.

The Etiology of Combat-Related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders
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.

Clinically, the readjustment problems these veterans suffer were designated as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders in the American Psychiatric Association's DIAGNOSTIC and STATISTICAL MANUAL III (DSM III).

Counseling psychologists working with Vietnam veterans in the DAV and VA outreach programs emphasize that these disorders are not mental illnesses. Rather, they are delayed reactions to the stress these veterans--particularly combat veterans--underwent during the war in Southeast Asia.

The nature of post-traumatic stress disorders among Vietnam veterans is described in this paper by Jim Goodwin, Psy.D. Himself a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam combat, Dr. Goodwin worked as a volunteer counselor in the DAV Vietnam Veterans Outreach Program while doing graduate work at the University of Denver's School of Professional Psychology. Following these studies, Dr. Goodwin rejoined the Armed Forces and is now a captain on active duty with the U.S. Army.

I have a copy of this hanging on my wall.

With all these years passing between what they knew and when they knew it, no one seems to care even more are suffering instead of healing. Here's a link to the book Forgotten Warrior Project: Identity, Ideology and Crisis - The Vietnam Veteran in Transition Paperback – 1977 by John P. Ph.D. Wilson