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Veteran Suicides


icanthearyou

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One is too many. We must rethink our handling of this issue. What we are doing now is not working. Our warriors deserve so much more. :flag:

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“I think women are just more emotional creatures as it is, and I mean that’s just my opinion,” Aguiar says. “When you are enlisted in the military, You have to have some sort of built-up emotion guard, and you have to kind of amount to the male aspect of it and be just as tough. So I think that they kind of put up walls to be strong as maybe their male counterparts. There needs to be more of a focus on women in the military.”

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http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/01/16811249-22-veterans-commit-suicide-each-day-va-report?lite

An estimated 22 veterans committed suicide in America each day in 2010, according to a report released Friday by the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs.

That rate has edged higher from 1999 when an estimated 20 veterans took their lives every day, the report noted. In 2007, the veteran suicide pace temporarily dipped to 18 per day.

Nearly 70 percent of all veteran suicides were among men and women aged 50 or older, the VA said.

"The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said in a news release. “We have more work to do and we will use this data to continue to strengthen our suicide prevention efforts and ensure all Veterans receive the care they have earned and deserve.”

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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

ichy, there probably is someone somewhere saying that "for everyone that dies, we save so much in disability $$$"
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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

ichy, there probably is someone somewhere saying that "for everyone that dies, we save so much in disability $$$"

God I hope not but, I would not doubt it for a moment. On the surface, it appears that our combat veterans are looked at more as "Army surplus" or, "long-term liabilities", rather than human beings.

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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

ichy, there probably is someone somewhere saying that "for everyone that dies, we save so much in disability $$$"

God I hope not but, I would not doubt it for a moment. On the surface, it appears that our combat veterans are looked at more as "Army surplus" or, "long-term liabilities", rather than human beings.

yep...

Lets see how much it could be...

$1300 X 8030 = $1.04BN/year

Now, multiply for life expectancy of say 27 years

27 X 1.04BN = 28.08BN/year.

That is the high side, but that is a lot of money in a VA Budget.

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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

Those lawyers are too busy burying our own soldiers and maintaining civil relations between the two countries. Often, soldiers leave outside the wire, afraid to defend themselves because if they do, they are at risk of going to Leavenworth.

Much like these two guys

http://www.defendmichael.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/army-officer-convicted-in-shooting-deaths-of-2-afghans/2013/08/01/6ec9aca6-fae0-11e2-a369-d1954abcb7e3_story.html

To include, When I was overseas, a gunner from a different unit fired at and killed an Afghan kid 50 meters away for the kid seemingly pointing an AK at him. The weapon ended up being fake, but the gunner couldn't have known that with all the dust in the air, and the fact that he felt like he needed to react instantaneously. He was court martialed and sent to prison for 30 years.

As far as mental health professionals overseas, there were none other than a chaplain. The role 3 hospitals were only equipped for battle related/ physical injuries. Two members in my unit became suicidal, and our unit was responsible for performing 24 hour suicide watches and each were sent home to a VA hospital roughly two weeks later.

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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

The people responsible for mental health in the military tried to sent this guy as a Psychiatrist to Afghanistan.............

Hasan_nidal.jpg

During the six years that Hasan worked as an intern and resident at Walter Reed, colleagues and superiors were deeply concerned about his behavior and comments. Hasan was not married at the time and was described as socially isolated, stressed by his work with soldiers, and upset about their accounts of warfare. Two days before the shooting, which occurred less than a month before he was due to deploy to Afghanistan, Hasan gave away many of his belongings to a neighbor

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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

Those lawyers are too busy burying our own soldiers and maintaining civil relations between the two countries. Often, soldiers leave outside the wire, afraid to defend themselves because if they do, they are at risk of going to Leavenworth.

Much like these two guys

http://www.defendmichael.com

http://www.washingto...b7e3_story.html

To include, When I was overseas, a gunner from a different unit fired at and killed an Afghan kid 50 meters away for the kid seemingly pointing an AK at him. The weapon ended up being fake, but the gunner couldn't have known that with all the dust in the air, and the fact that he felt like he needed to react instantaneously. He was court martialed and sent to prison for 30 years.

As far as mental health professionals overseas, there were none other than a chaplain. The role 3 hospitals were only equipped for battle related/ physical injuries. Two members in my unit became suicidal, and our unit was responsible for performing 24 hour suicide watches and each were sent home to a VA hospital roughly two weeks later.

Is there still the same stigma attached to "combat fatigue" as there once was? In the field, I mean.

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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

The people responsible for mental health in the military tried to sent this guy as a Psychiatrist to Afghanistan.............

Hasan_nidal.jpg

During the six years that Hasan worked as an intern and resident at Walter Reed, colleagues and superiors were deeply concerned about his behavior and comments. Hasan was not married at the time and was described as socially isolated, stressed by his work with soldiers, and upset about their accounts of warfare. Two days before the shooting, which occurred less than a month before he was due to deploy to Afghanistan, Hasan gave away many of his belongings to a neighbor

I think I see a problem! The craziest people do not make the best psychologists.

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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

Those lawyers are too busy burying our own soldiers and maintaining civil relations between the two countries. Often, soldiers leave outside the wire, afraid to defend themselves because if they do, they are at risk of going to Leavenworth.

Much like these two guys

http://www.defendmichael.com

http://www.washingto...b7e3_story.html

To include, When I was overseas, a gunner from a different unit fired at and killed an Afghan kid 50 meters away for the kid seemingly pointing an AK at him. The weapon ended up being fake, but the gunner couldn't have known that with all the dust in the air, and the fact that he felt like he needed to react instantaneously. He was court martialed and sent to prison for 30 years.

As far as mental health professionals overseas, there were none other than a chaplain. The role 3 hospitals were only equipped for battle related/ physical injuries. Two members in my unit became suicidal, and our unit was responsible for performing 24 hour suicide watches and each were sent home to a VA hospital roughly two weeks later.

Is there still the same stigma attached to "combat fatigue" as there once was? In the field, I mean.

Not like in WWII. Military personnel actually rotate back to the US after a year or less. That is how it was in Vietnam too. Combat fatigue or shell shock is typically experience during or right after a combat experience. PSTD can show up months later back in the US.

In WWII you were assigned to a combat unit until you got seriously wounded, died, or the war was over. Some soldiers used self inflected physical wounds of their hands and feet to get out of combat in WWII. So when a soldiers claimed combat fatigue or shell shock many thought they were faking it to get get out of combat.

In Vietnam where draftees could be sent to Vietnam for a year but they then got out of the military there was very little combat fatigue compared to WWII . Very few military reserve forces and national guard units were used in Vietnam.

That all changed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a all volunteer force with regular military and reserve units often being rotated several times to those wars. Now the thought of rotating back to places like Afghanistan results in more PSTD and self inflected wounds in the USA.

This article is from 2008.

http://www.newsweek.com/soldiers-self-harm-anything-not-go-back-iraq-90995

Soldiers' Self-Harm: ‘Anything Not to Go Back’ to Iraq

As an internist at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Stephanie Santos is used to finding odd things in people's stomachs. So last spring when a young man, identifying himself as an Iraq-bound soldier, said he had accidentally swallowed a pen at the bus station, she believed him. That is, until she found a second pen. It read 1-800-GREYHOUND. Last summer, according to published reports, a 20-year-old Bronx soldier paid a hit man $500 to shoot him in the knee on the day he was scheduled to return to Iraq. The year before that, a 24-year-old specialist from Washington state escaped a second tour of duty, according to his sister, by strapping on a backpack full of tools and leaping off the roof of his house, injuring his spine.

Such cases of self-harm are a "rising trend" that military doctors are watching closely, says Col. Kathy Platoni, an Army Reserve psychologist who has worked with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. "There are some soldiers who will do almost anything not to go back," she says. Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's top psychologist, agrees that we could see an uptick in intentional injuries as more U.S. soldiers serve long, repeated combat tours, "but we just don't have good, hard data on it." Intentional- injury cases are hard to identify, and even harder to prosecute. Fewer than 21 soldiers have been punitively discharged for self-harm since 2003, according to the military. What's worrying, however, is that American troops committed suicide at the highest rate on record in 2007—and the factors behind self-injury are similar: combat stress and strained relationships. "It's often the families that don't want soldiers to return to war," says Ritchie.

Soldiers have long used self-harm as a rip cord to avoid war. During World War I, The American Journal of Psychiatry reported "epidemics of self-inflicted injuries," hospital wards filled with men shot in a single finger or toe, as well as cases of pulled-out teeth, punctured eardrums and slashed Achilles' heels. Few doubt that the Korean and Vietnam wars were any different. But the current war—fought with an overtaxed volunteer Army—may be the worst. "We're definitely concerned," says Ritchie. "We hope they'll talk to us rather than self-harm."

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Hence the reason why we need a larger Army and Marine Corps. We ask so much out of a very few personnel and its very difficult for them to assimilate back into society after so much combat/deployment stress.

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Twenty-Two per day. Let that sink in for a moment. That is 154 per week. 616 per month. 8030 per year.

http://news.yahoo.co...-144907870.html

12.8 suicides per minute is the rate of suicides in the United States.

https://www.afsp.org/understanding-suicide/facts-and-figures

It's a issue that should have been a concern without veterans. Fortunately helping veterans is a good thing so things have are being initiated to help them. For the rest of the United States stripping access and funding is the norm.

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If memory serves me, I read that, at one time, our military had over 4,000 lawyers in Iraq. Can we not get any mental health professionals?

Those lawyers are too busy burying our own soldiers and maintaining civil relations between the two countries. Often, soldiers leave outside the wire, afraid to defend themselves because if they do, they are at risk of going to Leavenworth.

Much like these two guys

http://www.defendmichael.com

http://www.washingto...b7e3_story.html

To include, When I was overseas, a gunner from a different unit fired at and killed an Afghan kid 50 meters away for the kid seemingly pointing an AK at him. The weapon ended up being fake, but the gunner couldn't have known that with all the dust in the air, and the fact that he felt like he needed to react instantaneously. He was court martialed and sent to prison for 30 years.

As far as mental health professionals overseas, there were none other than a chaplain. The role 3 hospitals were only equipped for battle related/ physical injuries. Two members in my unit became suicidal, and our unit was responsible for performing 24 hour suicide watches and each were sent home to a VA hospital roughly two weeks later.

Is there still the same stigma attached to "combat fatigue" as there once was? In the field, I mean.

Not like in WWII. Military personnel actually rotate back to the US after a year or less. That is how it was in Vietnam too. Combat fatigue or shell shock is typically experience during or right after a combat experience. PSTD can show up months later back in the US.

In WWII you were assigned to a combat unit until you got seriously wounded, died, or the war was over. Some soldiers used self inflected physical wounds of their hands and feet to get out of combat in WWII. So when a soldiers claimed combat fatigue or shell shock many thought they were faking it to get get out of combat.

In Vietnam where draftees could be sent to Vietnam for a year but they then got out of the military there was very little combat fatigue compared to WWII . Very few military reserve forces and national guard units were used in Vietnam.

That all changed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a all volunteer force with regular military and reserve units often being rotated several times to those wars. Now the thought of rotating back to places like Afghanistan results in more PSTD and self inflected wounds in the USA.

This article is from 2008.

http://www.newsweek....back-iraq-90995

Soldiers' Self-Harm: ‘Anything Not to Go Back’ to Iraq

As an internist at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Stephanie Santos is used to finding odd things in people's stomachs. So last spring when a young man, identifying himself as an Iraq-bound soldier, said he had accidentally swallowed a pen at the bus station, she believed him. That is, until she found a second pen. It read 1-800-GREYHOUND. Last summer, according to published reports, a 20-year-old Bronx soldier paid a hit man $500 to shoot him in the knee on the day he was scheduled to return to Iraq. The year before that, a 24-year-old specialist from Washington state escaped a second tour of duty, according to his sister, by strapping on a backpack full of tools and leaping off the roof of his house, injuring his spine.

Such cases of self-harm are a "rising trend" that military doctors are watching closely, says Col. Kathy Platoni, an Army Reserve psychologist who has worked with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. "There are some soldiers who will do almost anything not to go back," she says. Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's top psychologist, agrees that we could see an uptick in intentional injuries as more U.S. soldiers serve long, repeated combat tours, "but we just don't have good, hard data on it." Intentional- injury cases are hard to identify, and even harder to prosecute. Fewer than 21 soldiers have been punitively discharged for self-harm since 2003, according to the military. What's worrying, however, is that American troops committed suicide at the highest rate on record in 2007—and the factors behind self-injury are similar: combat stress and strained relationships. "It's often the families that don't want soldiers to return to war," says Ritchie.

Soldiers have long used self-harm as a rip cord to avoid war. During World War I, The American Journal of Psychiatry reported "epidemics of self-inflicted injuries," hospital wards filled with men shot in a single finger or toe, as well as cases of pulled-out teeth, punctured eardrums and slashed Achilles' heels. Few doubt that the Korean and Vietnam wars were any different. But the current war—fought with an overtaxed volunteer Army—may be the worst. "We're definitely concerned," says Ritchie. "We hope they'll talk to us rather than self-harm."

All of this seems correct to me. I never heard of anybody harming theirselves to avoid deployment, but I'm sure there are a few soldiers that are willing to do so. I know, however, several people that tried to get medically disqualified for deployment and serve under the rear detachment. Sometimes it worked and other times they were sent to deployment under profile and they became fobbits.

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