He was remote and suspicious, and I could feel how depressed he was.
A heavy set Iraq veteran, he came with his wife, who stayed close at all times. But he was not emotionally responsive to her, or to anyone for that matter. On the third evening of the retreat, he chose to watch a film called the Gifts of Grief, one of several programs that were offered.
Two thirds of the way in, I saw him emerge from his deep freeze. First his eyes began to water, then a few tears ran down his cheeks. When the film ended, he got up. The color had returned to his face. His arm was around his wife. A few more tears trickled down. He made no effort to conceal or wipe them away. As I approached him, he began to talk about his losses during the war, how unbearable they had been, how he hadn't told anyone. There were more hugs with his wife, conversation, and, during the large group, he leaned over and gave her a kiss.
He began talking with his fellow vets. He was alive again. In a small group meeting he described how desperate he'd felt and revealed how he'd tried unsuccessfully to kill himself to end it. During the large closing circle he surprised everyone by speaking and expressing his gratitude to all gathered. It was visible that the depression had lifted, at least for the moment. He'd come back from the dead. Then he said something that stopped me: he looked forward to seeing everyone again next year, if he was still here.
This veteran was already in psychological treatment, and on all kinds of medications. After the retreat, a fellow spouse whom his wife had befriended contacted me and let me know that his house was being foreclosed on. It had brought him spiraling back down, and he'd become suicidal again. The support and resources he and his wife received from fellow vets and spouses they'd connected with at the retreat helped him make it through intact.
There are other examples of vets expressing suicidal feelings and even revealing attempts, past and planned, that they've never told anyone, sometimes even their therapist.
A new Department of Defense report brings into sharp focus just how elusive a solution to the continuing alarming rise in suicides among active duty service members is. In 2012, there have been 154 military suicides in 155 days, a rate of one per day, more than the number of combat deaths during the same period. And suicides have also eclipsed car crashes as the top "non-combat" cause of US troop deaths. It is truly alarming that these numbers do not include National Guard and Reservists and Veterans. Paul Rieckhoff, Executive Director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, reports that 37 percent of the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans among their approximately 160,000 members know another veteran who has committed suicide.
But when at-risk veterans are in a safe environment with fellow vets they trust, and with whom they can stay connected -- that's what can begin to make a huge difference.
At the Coming Home Project, we call it the power of community. In the military, it goes by the name unit cohesion. In the research world, social support. Although not a panacea, it heals and prevents, strengthens and inoculates, all at the same time. Unit cohesion correlated, in one study, with lower suicide rates.
Feeling safe, understood, and accepted without judgment are pivotal elements of community. Another key is a sense of belonging. Dr. David Kahn, an authority on suicide prevention, wrote in 2008 about studies with students, "Connection and a feeling of social belonging is, I think, the most important initial step in preventing suicide," he said. "Once the person feels that sense of trust in belonging to the community, they may be more receptive to suggestions that they seek help, if they haven't sought it already." This was confirmed at every turn at Coming Home's recent student veterans' retreat near Yosemite.
Jackie Garrick, head of the newly established Defense Suicide Prevention Office at the Pentagon, expressed concern in an interview about the increase in the military suicide rate, "Experts are still struggling to understand suicidal behavior," she said. "What makes one person become suicidal and another not is truly an unknown." I admire her honesty; a good leader is honest. Not knowing is a good place to start. Here is what I've seen and learned:
Although the need for psychological treatment will continue, and top notch psychological services must be made more accessible, I think the future of suicide prevention and resilience programs (as well as reintegration, transition assistance, and mental health programs) lies in integrative community-based public health approaches that are interdisciplinary, community-building and educational. These will be psychiatry-friendly but not based on compartmentalized, medical models of mental disorder and mental health. They will acknowledge the thirst for spirituality-friendly venues where the moral and spiritual injuries of war that I and others, including Shay, Tick and Dewey, have written about. These wounds are what keep veterans up at night, for decades, and contribute to despair and hopelessness so profound that they often lead to suicide. It takes a community to welcome, weather and help transform such unbearable experiences and feelings. To enable veterans to feel that they belong, they matter, are accepted, and understood.
These optimal settings, based in the community and working in concert with the military and the VA, will cultivate durable, ongoing social support opportunities for veterans and their families. Service members, veterans and their families benefit from such approaches. We should make them part and parcel of reintegration and mental health programming and provide the resources necessary for them to grow.
Follow Joseph Bobrow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Coming_Home
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Remember to avoid endlessly repeated deployments to pointless needless wars.
Cutting back on redeploying soldiers after multiple severe head injuries might be a good idea too.
Perhaps better mental health risk screening on the way in, if for no other reason than you'd never have a had a better chance to understand the problem, given the orgy of casualties over the last decade, following thirty years where a single one was unacceptable. It has to jolt the career soldier.
Hard to believe we have a Department of Veterans Affairs. Not to mention shameful.
But, that does not relieve the Military and it's Civilian Leadership of the responsibility of holding harassers responsible.
Nor does it absolve those in positions of leadership of the responsibility of making it crystal clear that no level of harassment will be tolerated.
Nor does it absolve those who sit idly by and watch the harassment of the responsibility to do something to stop it.
And most of all it does not absolve the organization of the responsibility of making the wrongs they do right.
Anything less than full accountability for this behavior is a decision to be complicit in it.
Anyone who engages in it or is unwilling to stand up and stop it is a coward.
http://www.disabledveterans.org/2011/04/16/republicans-seek-to-cut-1-3-million-veterans/
CUTS SO THE RICH CAN GET ANOTHER TAX CUT IN THE AMOUNT OF $5 TRILLION OVER THE NEXT 10 YEARS.......((NOT INCLUDING THE EXISTING BUSH '01 AND '03 TAX CUTS))
Support the troops and Veterans, vote these hypocrites OUT !
Now, that being said, Vets have a distinct set of problems that can be addressed, and suicide can be examined in that small population and the causes addressed (and to some extent that is being tried). One of the big components missing is the spiritual aspect of out personality. Most people do in fact crave some contact with the supernatural. Of course, in this day and age it has become fashionable to ignore to deny any higher power. Yet, when it comes down to the fundamentals, and combat tends to screen the distractions quite brutally, the only point of reference in the universe is yourself it's a pretty lonely place. Your health has many components: physical, emotional, social, AND spiritual. It is part of our makeup. Denying that fact often causes much damage.
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2012/05/surge-of-snap-sergeants-2.html
PART OF THIS POST:
Dredd
Our government is a wartocracy.
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22 hours ago ( 2:29 PM)
I guess that means it won't help with the actual figure (18 per day, 6,570 per year) either.
The last figures I had heard was one service member every 80 minutes, which is very close to your figures :(
If...the same budgets were spent on reducing hunger, homelessness, poverty, starvation, sickness world wide we would have a different village to live in. It's not because we don't have enough, it's only because trade and economics are the bargaining tools used to create demand. We now have food on the futures trading floor so profit is the motivation, not equal distribution.
It suits corporations to have conflict. And men and women will answer the call to defend, only to be discarded once their finished with, or of no use. Here I am not reducing their service, but I am fully questioning the intention of those who still see war as a solution. It is not.
If, the budget for war was used as a builder of bridges, irrespective of religion, race, colour, culture, nationality, so that the strategy was not to defend and attack, but to seek a path where we meet in equality, tolerance and acceptance, maybe we would leave a better home for our kids. Imagine politics, corporations and media committed to this.
Imagine. You may say I'm a dreamer.....
Thank you!!
Remember Michele Bachmanns’s attempted $4 billion cut from disabled veterans compensation? Well, “they’re ba-ack…” Except this time they are looking to cut away at our VA healthcare.
http://www.disabledveterans.org/2011/04/16/republicans-seek-to-cut-1-3-million-veterans/
The Government, on the other hand, didn't care what happened to the men who returned from that conflict or what it did to them. The people who run the miliitary rarely do. I'm glad you could find the kind of help you needed, and I hope you can put the trauma behind you. If we spent as much money caring for the people who came back as we do to send them over, we might be on the way to a better and stonger military, and healthier veterans.
Saddam had the Europeans experiencing de ja vu. As an American living in Belgium, those people treated us (headquarters for multi-national corps, NATO, etc) like kings and queens.
Those were the days when Bush Sr. and even Cheney had bits of brain matter.
Do you walk? I can't take meds. When I had two in Iraq in '08 I HAD TO WALK......some days it was up to 12 + miles......lost weight that summer :)
My thoughts and prayers will be with you friend.
http://www.yogawarriors.com/
Complementary alternative medicine is your friend, sir.
Namaste
Thanx for your valued input. :)