Sen. John McCain blocks suicide prevention—Happy Holidays Veterans

By Chaplain Kathie at Veterans Today

A small crisis group gets calls all the time from veterans in crisis. Considering these men and women know what it is like to face death on a daily basis, hte fact that they are reaching the point where all seems hopeless indicates a crisis itself. We fail to grasp how serious this is. Yet on one night this same small crisis group had to rescue five suicidal veterans!

Suicide Prevention Workers See Spike In Calls
Oregon Partnership Reports Five Suicide Rescues In Two Hours

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Workers with Oregon Partnership are calling on the public to get educated on the warning signs of suicide following an increase in the need for suicide rescues.

A suicide rescue is when crisis line workers have to intervene in a suicide attempt by sending police to the person's house, said Leslie Storm, Crisis Line Supervisor.

Last Wednesday, Storm said they had five suicide rescues in a two-hour period; an amount she calls unprecedented.
"We've never done five in one evening. I've been here four years, we don't do five a week generally so this is very alarming to us," Storm said.

Oregon Partnership is a non-profit organization that provides drug and alcohol awareness, drug prevention programs and a 24-hour crisis lines for suicide intervention. The organization also operates a crisis line for military members and their families, as well as a treatment referral line.
Suicide Prevention Workers See Spike In Calls

Now you can try to pass all of this off the way Senator John McCain does as the veteran politician playing the role of veteran's hero, but this man passes off everything veterans need instead of passing it on. He always loves to play up to veterans for their votes but then votes against them.

Rep. Holt: Sen. McCain Objected To My Military Suicide Prevention Bill

By Amanda Terkel

WASHINGTON — In 2008, a young sergeant named Coleman S. Bean took his life. After completing his first tour of duty in Iraq, he had come home and been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nevertheless, he was deployed to Iraq a second time. Bean had sought treatment for PTSD but as a member of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), he found fewer resources available to him than to veterans and active-duty members.

In April, Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) introduced legislation named after the late soldier meant to provide more resources for suicide prevention to Reserve members. The House in May incorporated it into the National Defense Authorization Act for 2011, but it was stripped from the final version, and Holt is pointing the finger at the lead Republican negotiator on the Senate legislation, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

"Twice now, the Senate has stripped this legislation from our defense bill," Holt told The Huffington Post Tuesday. "It's hard to understand why. I know for a fact, because he told me, that Sen. McCain doesn't support it. Whether he's the only one, I don't know. But there was no effort to try to improve the language or negotiate changes; it was just rejected, and I think that is not only bad policy, but it's cruel. It's cruel to the families that are struggling with catastrophic mental health problems."

"He [McCain] said having these counselors check in with the Reservists every few months this way overreaching," continued Holt, relaying a phone conversation he had had with the senator. "I asked him in what sense it was overreaching. Surely he didn't think there wasn't a problem, did he? I must say I don't understand it."

Read more here: John McCain blocks suicide prevention bill.

I ask veterans all the time why they vote for him or support him. They say he's a Vietnam Vet, but they can't say what he's done for any Vietnam vet. They say he's was a POW but they can't say what he did for other POW's like the ones from the Gulf War when they tried to sue Iraq for what Saddam did to them and he went against it. They hear the words come out of his mouth saying he cares and that is all they need to know. The real issue is they are suffering for the support they give to men like him. They never bother to look up his voting record.

So now we have troops committing suicide more and more every year along with veterans killing themselves yet McCain doesn't care just like every other bill he has either tried to stop or voted against.

These lives matter to us but they don't matter to him. The numbers coming into suicide prevention hotlines reflect how serious this has been but this one story on 5 rescues in one night out of Oregon Partnership should have everyone in congress running around like the House is falling down to get this done but McCain leads the way on running away from the veterans he loves to suck the life out of for their votes. How this vampire keeps getting elected only proves he's a good liar and veterans hate to think they've been betrayed by one of their own.

Number of Army Suicides Already Surpasses 2009 Total

By Chaplain Kathie

This is what we knew after Vietnam with most being deployed once.

This was published by the DAV stating clearly we already had 500,000 in Readjustment Problems Among Vietnam Veterans, The Etiology of Combat-Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorders by Jim Goodwin, Psy.D. It hangs on the wall of my office, old and worn out, to remind me everyday of how much of what we already knew has been ignored. With one deployment we had huge numbers of veterans with PTSD, over 300,000 ended up homeless and two studies put the numbers of suicides between 150,000 and 200,000, topped off with the latest studies putting the figure of veterans committing suicide at a rate of 18 a day.
Tracking the numbers it becomes clear that after all these years, they have no clue what they are doing. The Army published a report stating clearly the redeployment of troops increased the risk of PTSD by 50%, yet they continued to do it without addressing what this was doing to the soldiers.

Medications are more of an issue than we think about because of several reasons. The first is short-term memory loss leaving many deployed with medications they forgot they already took. Medications that are just not strong enough while they are in Iraq or Afghanistan leaving them playing their own doctor and taking more than they should because they can't just decide to go see a doctor with bombs blowing up and bullets coming at them. Then the issue of most of these medications coming with the warning about not using any kind of equipment while taking them along with the need to be monitored by a doctor.

PTSD is hard enough to survive but when the DOD decided they would redeploy them no matter what, it added to all they have to go through. The last thing they needed was for all of the studies we had going back 40 years to be ignored and nothing learned.

Number of Army Suicides Already Surpasses 2009 Total

By Sara Sorcher
Friday, November 19, 2010 6:30 p.m.

Despite a rapidly expanding effort to improve the mental well-being of its soldiers, new Army data suggest that the service’s suicide epidemic shows little sign of improvement, with more troops taking their own lives so far this year than ever before.

The data released by the Pentagon on Friday indicate that there were 25 potential suicides for both active-duty and reserve service members. Two by active-duty troops were confirmed. In a separate document from the Army, five suicides of reservists have been confirmed. The rest are all under investigation.

As of today’s numbers, at least 172 soldiers committed suicide this year—surpassing last year’s total of 162 for all of 2009.
Suicide is the third-leading cause of death for soldiers, trailing only combat deaths and accidental deaths from drug overdoses and drunken driving, the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said in the foreword to a report on military suicide issued in July. Chiarelli, a four-star general, has made a personal commitment to suicide prevention.

The military has invested tens of millions of dollars in a crash effort to combat the ever-increasing suicide rate, hiring more mental-health professionals, installing video-teleconferencing centers to allow soldiers on remote bases in Afghanistan to communicate with stateside mental-health professionals, and distributing laminated cards for soldiers to better recognize signs of depression or suicidal thoughts.

With that in mind, here's a visit back to the medication issue that will blow your mind.

Prescription drugs were involved in almost one-third of the service’s active-duty suicides, the Army’s suicide-prevention task force said in its July report.

National Journal reported in October that the number of psychiatric-medication prescriptions filled for customers ages 18 to 34—the age range of most active-duty troops and their spouses—soared by 85 percent between 2003 and 2009, according to the military’s health insurance system.
Number of Army Suicides Surpasses 2009

Updated: Army Still Says Risky Behavior, Not War Drives Suicide Rates

- U.S. Army: It’s not war; the “risky behavior” of our troops at home drives them to suicide. Did you know that a solider committing suicide with a pistol often has just engaged in the high-risk behavior of aiming at his head and squeezing the trigger, in blatant violation of existing Army policies and standards? -

Update: See DoD Suicide Task Force Contradicts Army Findings and Insider: The DoD and Military Brass Don't Know and Don't Care about Suicide.

via mal contends

The Army calls their report released in July: The Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, and Suicide Prevention (HP/RR/SP) Report, the “result of a focused 15-month effort to better understand the increasing rate of suicides in the force.”

One wonders what exactly the Army-sanctioned authors do understand in this 9.97 MB of wasted computer space. The Army says suicides are caused by "high-risk behaviors" and "erosion of adherence to existing Army policies and standards."

Those servicemen and women and their reckless behavior! That’s why the high suicide rate.

Responds Steve Robinson who retired from the Army in 2001, after a career serving in Ranger and Special Operations units: "The leadership treats this problem as a lack of moral character, and a lack of intestinal fortitude, when it is really a medical issue. If somebody lost their legs due to an IED [improvised explosive device], and the leader came, and said, 'Get up! Get back to your job! Get back into the humvee!': That is the same thing that they are actually doing to people with these mental-health injuries and traumatic brain injuries that you can’t see. They simply do not understand the medical side of what has happened to the human mind and body, and they are punishing people for having the symptoms of PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder] and traumatic brain injury. And when you do that, it’s the same as punishing an amputee for having lost his legs."

Nothing in the Army report’s finding about war, the risky nature of war, repeated deployments, the stupidity of making war at any price. It’s the troops’ fault, the Marines’ fault, and a lack of leadership in keeping an eye on those reckless men and women who just need a firmer hand and tighter regulations.

“The dedicated effort behind this report sends a clear message to our force that we take the resiliency of our soldiers and families very seriously,” said Secretary of the Army John McHugh. “This effort is part of our culture to look closely at ourselves, and to make continuous improvements in our capability – but most importantly, to reduce the number of soldiers we lose to suicide.”

Sorry to put you through McHugh, but you get the message they’re sending: Covering War’s ass, either that or: We’re incredibly stupid..

The Army’s key findings:

Gaps in the current HP/RR/SP policies, processes and programs necessary to mitigate high risk behaviors;

Erosion of adherence to existing Army policies and standards;

Increase in indicators of high risk behavior including illicit drug use, other crimes and suicide attempts;

Of course, targeting veterans and those actively serving is nothing new. See Blaming the Veteran: The Politics of PTSD (Ford, Huber, and Meagher),a truly classic piece of work published in February 2006.

But one has to look to fiction to describe the utter vacuity and obtuse mindlessness of the U.S. Army brass in addressing the epidemic suicide rate.

I refer you to that paragon of leadership, resiliency and regulations against the reckless, one Major Frank Burns (also known as Ferret Face played expertly by Larry Linville) from the M*A*S*H* television series.

“Well, I’m glad the Army has that cleared up,” said Frank to his disbelieving unit who were fed-up with the Army brass.