120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
RolandTD20Kdrummer
Posts: 13,066
http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=4882
"Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone — and remember, this is just in 45 states — there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.
Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call “accidental noncombat deaths” to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have “personal problems.”
Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn’t track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.
They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called “that most secret death” because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it’s a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it’s too late to say you’re sorry.
The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.
For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. “Those people, they aren’t like us; they don’t value life the way we do,” runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn’t even sub-: “Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania,” proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.
Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn’t the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.
Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!
Neglect? The VA’s current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people — too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn’t there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.
Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn’t translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I’m not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.
There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don’t enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don’t sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.
There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That’s a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn’t it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
*I say “about” because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces."
"Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone — and remember, this is just in 45 states — there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.
Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call “accidental noncombat deaths” to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have “personal problems.”
Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn’t track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.
They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called “that most secret death” because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it’s a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it’s too late to say you’re sorry.
The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.
For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. “Those people, they aren’t like us; they don’t value life the way we do,” runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn’t even sub-: “Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania,” proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.
Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn’t the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.
Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!
Neglect? The VA’s current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people — too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn’t there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.
Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn’t translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I’m not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.
There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don’t enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don’t sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.
There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That’s a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn’t it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
*I say “about” because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces."
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and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
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Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
I know if I was walking patrol in a crowded market when a suicide bomber blew himself up, seeing that carnage, I would never be the same. Most of us just aren't built to handle that kind of trauma.
Our soldiers deserve the best. They deserve the best training, best equipment, best pay, and best treatment we can buy. If that's too expensive then tough shit, get them the hell out of harm's way.
LOL, this is such fucking bullshit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
First of all, you got it from a place called "black-listed news", are you kidding me? Why the fuck would you be on a website called that anyways?
So you're trying to say that over a thousand more soldiers commited suicide in 2005 alone, than we have actually lost in Iraq during the entire 5 years we've been there? That makes no sense at all!!!!
If that were true, it would be one of the biggest news stories, if not THE story of the entire war. Sorry, but you just don't lose more soldiers to suicide than you do to combat. I'm pretty sure that is unpresidented in the history of warfare. Not to mention, a war that is FARRRRRRRRR less "bloody" and messy than most in history.
According to the guiness book of world records, over 1.1 million people were killed in just 5 months at the battle of Stalingrad. You want to talk about bloody wars. Iraq doesn't even compare to the carnage of most wars.
It even says that they are counting pretty much anyone who served in any war. So basically a guy could have served in the first gulf war, never seen combat and then 7 years after getting back killed himself for some other reason entirely unrelated to the time he served. I am not saying vets don't deserve all the care they need, I just think this article is flawed.
I tried this tact last time there was a thread about this, and people said math complicates and lessens the issue. WTF.
Anyway, here's the thread from summer:
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=254717
I'd like to understand the actual numbers as well. It does appear that the military has a higher suicide rate, but I'd like to see some real stats.
I thought the same thing... til I hit this paragraph:
"...the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces.
...in 2005 alone — ...in 45 states — there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day."
...
This would include current Iraq/Afghanistan Wars, Gulf War, Viet Nam, Korea and World War II. And remember, many of the homeless men out there are Viet Nam Vets with serious psychological and abuse problems.
Hail, Hail!!!
Heres the suicide stats for 2004.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-us-statistics-and-prevention.shtml
"Suicide is a major, preventable public health problem. In 2004, it was the eleventh leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 32,439 deaths.1 The overall rate was 10.9 suicide deaths per 100,000 people.1 An estimated eight to 25 attempted suicides occur per every suicide death"
I didnt do the math, and if somone wants to, please do. But Ill bet that the number of suicides of military personel is close to the same ratio of the "normal suicide rate".
How many people served in that 12 year span that DIDNT commit suicide?
Talk about smoke and mirrors.
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It's a simple trick to report on statistics to support a point. Which is why i don't put much weight into statistics alone. Statistics are a part of the stroy... but, never the whole story.
Hail, Hail!!!
Of course stats are only part of the story but in the above story they don't really give you enough information to decide if the 120 per week is really a high or a low number, they just kind of throw it out there for shock value. For all we know it could be exactly inline with the national average, meaning that their time in the military had nothing to do with the suicide. Plus like you posted above this included vets from WW2 and Korea. Those guys could have done their duty and then killed themselves in the 40 years later over something entirely unrelated to their service.
That was my point. The story presents the statistics in a manner that alone... is shocking. It is meant to try to link the 120 per week with the curent conflict in Iraq... which is not the true case.
That's why I stated, the term, 'War Veterans' can go all the way back to World War II... and the reason why they committed suicide is never stated.
The statistics may be true... but they are used in a manner to support a point of view. I'm saying... don't buy into it based solely upon the numbers.
Hail, Hail!!!
"CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone — and remember, this is just in 45 states — there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main3496471.shtml
hey bonehead...your google broken?
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
Sorry about that. I though you were taking the opposite view, when myself and some other posters mentioned that there isn't enough statistical data by saying that statistics don't mean anything. But I see now you were talking about the numbers used by the original story, and your point is totally right.
On top of learning what the rate among veterans is compared to the society average, I would be also interested in seeing how it compares to other professions. For example I have always heard that dentists have a high rate of suicide, are vets higher than dentists?
*MUSIC IS the expression of EMOTION.....and that POLITICS IS merely the DECOY of PERCEPTION*
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This is news many in the media including the Pentagon wouldn't want to get out.
Peace
*MUSIC IS the expression of EMOTION.....and that POLITICS IS merely the DECOY of PERCEPTION*
.....song_Music & Politics....Michael Franti
*The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite INSANE*....Nikola Tesla(a man who shaped our world of electricity with his futuristic inventions)
I would have to say that this story is very misleading. They try to make you beleive that 6,000 war on terror veterans killed themselves in 05. In reality that figure covers all veterans, which there are millions of them living in the US. It's poor journalism to talk about how this "epidemic" centers on the young soldiers, when the figures include suicides that are not in that age group. Give us a real, accurate statistic. And compare the same demographics with the general population so we can make a true comaprison.
From a comment to this story...
"As a Marine veteran of Just Cause and the first Gulf war I need to say that even one suicide is one too many but the CBS story is very flawed. They compared two numbers that have no demographic relation. The military is over 80% male and approx 60% white, and 74% in the 18 to 30 age range. If you compare suicide rates keeping the demographics consistent the difference in suicide rates is less than .3 percent. (They did not take age into account) Enough with the scare mongering. If this is the best the press can do we will never get to the real problems this country faces."
I think it amplifies the situation/problem as Veterans don't seem to be able to cope many years later, and eventually fall out of society in the worst possible way. All f-ed up, lost and forgotten..used and abused.
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
A couple of reasons we are not seeing as many deaths in Iraq as in Viet Nam are the advancements in med-evac and forward operating surgical hospitals in the battle zone. Many of the same injuries would have been fatal without the better body armor, Kevlar, quick evacuation and immediate surgery advancements. The more survivors... the more out patient care is required. I say, Give it to them... no matter what. If we are a 'Grateful Nation'.. and 'Support Our Troops'... we do NOT abandon them when they come home. An increase in our taxes to pay for their well being is miniscule compared to the pain they are forced to endure... in our names.
Our soldier's health and well being... your taxes. Ask yourself... which is more important to you?
Hail, Hail!!!
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This thought occured to me right after I read this line...
This is a really clumsy assumption to make and points to a very obvious agenda which kind of devalues the argument.
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