{"id":31115,"date":"2012-07-27T17:12:30","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T21:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=31115"},"modified":"2012-07-27T17:26:20","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T21:26:20","slug":"time-the-war-on-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=31115","title":{"rendered":"Time: The War On Suicide?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Time magazine has an article this week about suicide in the military<\/a>, which does have some interesting points. Too bad they can’t see those points in their very own reportage. First of all, as pointed out by Richard who sent us the link, they arrive at a stunning conclusion not often admitted to by the drive-media when talking about military suicides, combat participation doesn’t have much to do with identifying prospective suicide attempts; <\/p>\n

…combat trauma alone can’t account for the trend. Nearly a third of the suicides from 2005 to 2010 were among troops who had never deployed; 43% had deployed only once. Only 8.5% had deployed three or four times. Enlisted service members are more likely to kill themselves than officers, and 18-to-24-year-olds more likely than older troops. Two-thirds do it by gunshot; 1 in 5 hangs himself. And it’s almost always him: nearly 95% of cases are male. A majority are married.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, it looks to me from Time’s own statistics, soldiers are less likely to commit suicide the more they deploy. And then they pretend that they never wrote that paragraph;<\/p>\n

One theory of suicide holds that people who feel useful, who feel as if they belong and serve a larger cause, are less likely to kill themselves. That would explain why active-duty troops historically had lower suicide rates than civilians. But now experts who study the patterns wonder whether prolonged service during wartime may weaken that protective function.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me that if only 8.5% of troops who deploy three or more times commit suicide, prolonged service during wartime strengthens that protective function that they mentioned there. Of the two soldiers that they highlight in the story, one had deployed as a helicopter pilot but never engaged the enemy, the other was an OB\/GYN in a hospital in Hawaii, neither hard-bitten combat soldiers who fit the neat mold that the media likes to talk about. <\/p>\n

We had four incidents of suicide in my unit during Desert Storm. Three were from the Scout platoon and killed themselves before we deployed, the fourth had deployed, but he, an E-7, had been the Battalion S-4 NCO and shot himself when he came back and found out that his wife had been unfaithful while he was in the war. Repeatedly. And she discovered that she liked it and didn’t stop cheating after he came back. None of those can be linked to combat, either, except they thought that the three Scouts killed themselves to avoid combat which makes no sense. I’m not aware of any other suicides from that unit, but I might be wrong.<\/p>\n

And while I’m more disturbed by suicides by military members more than the rest of Americans, they still only account for 20% of the total suicides in the US.<\/p>\n

But what makes preventing suicide so confounding is that even therapy often fails. “Over 50% of the soldiers who committed suicide in the four years that I was vice [chief] had seen a behavioral-health specialist,” recalls [Peter W. Chiarelli, former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army]. “It was a common thing to hear about someone who had committed suicide who went in to see a behavioral-health specialist and was dead within 24, 48 or 72 hours–and to hear he had a diagnosis that said, ‘This individual is no danger to himself or anyone else.’ That’s when I realized that something’s the matter.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, Time tries their best to blame the military’s inattention to the problem, but that’s hardly the problem. If they’re sending people to behavioral specialists and those patients then commit suicide irrespective of the diagnosis, then there’s something wrong with the science, not the military’s culture. <\/p>\n

I think the solution is in our own veteran community, not in the school-trained “specialists. And I think it was what these Medal of Honor recipients were trying to convey;<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Veterans saving veterans. If the military wants to help potential suicide victims, they need to look at who they’re hiring instead of looking solely at credentials. And the VSOs need to start their own outreach programs. This is the next war that veterans need to engage with, and we all need to get further ahead of it than we are right now.<\/p>\n

Parachute Cutie can tell the story about how she firmly believes that I saved a soldier’s life one night over pitchers of beer in Silver Spring, Maryland. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but all I did was tell him that he’s not the first to have those feelings, that we all think about it from time-to-time, and somehow we make the brave decision to stick it out instead. And apparently, he agreed, because he’s still around. But it convinced me that the newest veterans value our opinions and look to us for guidance, and it’s time for us to step up and accept the challenge.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t clicked the “Shoulder to Shoulder” link in the left side bar and watched the video, you should really take the 15 minutes to watch it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time magazine has an article this week about suicide in the military, which does have some … Time: The War On Suicide?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}