Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
“There were 154 suicides among active-duty troops in the first 155 days of the year, according to a recent report from the Associated Press, a number that is 50 percent higher than the number of U.S. forces killed in action in Afghanistan over that time period. It is the highest rate in 10 years of war.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/panetta-calls-rise-in-military-suicide-troubling-and-tragic/2012/06/22/gJQAnQSPvV_blog.html
The above quote was taken from an article in yesterday’s Washington Post. The article was about a statement made by Defense Secretary Leo Panetta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Panetta speaking to a Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs annual conference on suicide prevention in the military.
“Panetta called suicide in the military “perhaps the most frustrating challenge” he has faced since becoming secretary of defense last year.
There are no easy answers, but that is no damn reason for not finding the answer to the problem of suicide,” Panetta told attendees at the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs annual conference on suicide prevention in the military.
The conference heard Thursday from a panel of family members who spoke of what they said was the military services’ failure to provide appropriate and timely mental health care to service members who had sought help.”
“The stories told by the family panel members run counter to the prevailing wisdom that the biggest hurdle in trying to prevent suicide in the military is the stigma associated with seeking help, noted Bonnie Carroll, president and founder of Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), a military family group that organized the panel.
“We were hearing about folks who said, ‘I want to get help, I want to be better, I have a lot to live for,’ but were not getting that help,” Carroll said.
“In his address Friday morning, Panetta said that it is the responsibility of leaders from non-commissioned officers on up to ensure that troops showing signs of stress be “aggressively” encouraged to seek help. “We have to make clear we will not tolerate actions that belittle, that haze individuals, particularly those who seek help,” he said. Panetta said concerns about access to behavioral health care prompted his decision earlier this month to order a service-wide review of mental health diagnoses. The action followed an Army investigation into concerns that some soldiers had their diagnoses reversed because of the costs of caring for them. “
Let me be fair and say that I have no doubt as to the sincerity of Secretary Panetta in wanting to deal with this issue and I approve of all efforts to get treatment both psychologically and emotionally to provide our troops with all the assistance they need. However, as much effort as is put into solving this problem by the powers that be, the essential issue is that war is horrible and our country has now engaged in two wars that have lasted almost a decade. Beyond that, as these wars have worn on it has become increasingly obvious to all concerned that there was no need to fight them in the first place. Our troops are not stupid and I believe despite the great efforts to indoctrinate them with purpose, they recognize the futility of their efforts. If I’m correct then how does a rational human being connect the constant dangers and bloody revulsion they must feel, with the reality of their service?
My sense is that the connection, as many in our Armed Services have stated repeatedly, is to the other members of their squad. Nothing establishes a bond between human beings as strong as that of shared hardship and danger, save for perhaps sex and as we know that can be temporary at best. If the good of ones immediate comrades then become one’s motivation for survival, how is that individual affected by their injuries and deaths? Concurrently though, if ones immediate comrades bond to form a strong cohesive unit, where in their hierarchy of feelings do they place their spouses, children and other family?
Over and again, in interviews and in literature, the experience of war as related by those involved in its prosecution, is that they have never felt so alive in all their lives. While I’ve thankfully never had the experience of combat, as a human being I think I can understand what that emotion must be like. Most of us can in fact understand that. Think of the times in your life when you have been faced with danger and the heightened feelings that are associated with it as our body produces adrenalin and goes on the alert. Take those times, with for must of us have been relatively brief and imagine spending six month tours of duty, where these experiences are ongoing. What then does someone do when you juxtapose returning home to ones loved ones to that feeling of “aliveness”. My guess is that life must seem almost empty when returning to the safety of their “normal” lives. We humans, due to our self-awareness thrive on “purpose”. Since we are mortal and since we really don’t know if death is an ending or beginning, we all must find a purpose to our existence, or it becomes meaningless.
Our troops, usually at an age where they are just becoming adults, find that purpose in their military service. When sent to combat their purpose narrows into one of survival of themselves and their comrades. Many marry young and begin families, only to be separated for long periods from those families. In relationships, despite the cliché that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”, propinquity is really the glue that holds relationships together. Young children grow quickly and need the presence and constant bonding of parenthood. So too that bonding holds true for the parent. Extended absences loosen that bond. Returning home, as joyous as the initial feelings may be, can also be trying on those reuniting.
This though isn’t really about the specific why of this terribly alarming rate of suicide among our troops. Millions of words, thousands of studies have been completed and yet suicide is still a human behavior that both mystifies us and fills us with disquiet. What I can state definitively is the obvious. Suicide is the act of someone who has found that their life is no longer tolerable and feels that there is no chance of future improvement. There is no one size fits all solutions to why someone kills themselves, because the reasons are unique to the individual. When we talk of our troop’s participation in a never-ending war, in a foreign culture where we are rightly seen as invaders, isn’t the root cause of suicides rather obvious, even if each person’s act is unique to them.
If we were really serious about ending the alarming, increasing suicides among our troops, then perhaps we should end these purposeless wars, that have far outlasted any wars in this nation’s history, save for Viet Nam. In Viet Nam, where fifty thousand died and hundreds of thousands were injured both physically and psychologically, this nation learned the lesson of the destructiveness of a purposeless war of choice. The difference now is that our news media shared the horrors of Viet Nam with us. Now the deaths and the destruction are barely reported upon and no doubt the anonymity of their sacrifices also plays a role in the obvious despair that those led to suicide feel. This doesn’t even begin to take into account those who don’t choose that final option and yet whose lives have been broken by the devastation they’ve experienced.
While we may tepidly applaud the efforts of Defense Department to ameliorate this problem, the fact remains that the most obvious, yet unaired way to stop these suicides is to end the wars immediately and unequivocally. Yet obvious as this may be, we all know that the U.S. engagement in all parts of this world will not end soon under our current national predilection. With the buildup of the U.S. military under the necessity of World War II, those profiting from it and the military itself, found that America as the world military power kept them employed and wealthy. Having a paranoid, psychotic like Stalin, leading the Soviet Union provided an excellent excuse to engage in continuing to build American military strength and proclaiming a Cold War. The collapse of Chiang Kai Shek’s despotic rule of China, succeeded by Mao Tse Tsung’s communist regime, gave the appearance of an epic struggle between the “good” of Capitalism and the “bad” of Communism. To the mutual content of these opposing powers militarist leadership this “War” was fought on a global basis. As the beloved Dwight Eisenhower was retiring from the Presidency, this great former Five Star General was so bothered by the entrenchment of militarism in the U.S. that he cautioned its citizens to “beware of the Military-Industrial Complex”.
Ultimately, my point here is that the suicides of our troops is precisely related to the waging of endless wars, which have no real relationship to issues vital to our country. A person will, given the threat to their family and to their country, be willing to risk their very existence to stave it off. When that “threat” begins to assume a never-ending continuity and ones sacrifices are given lip service for those they purportedly are fighting for, can we doubt the onset of despair?
The ability to express ideas and come to conclusions regarding problems is limited by the language available. The power of our Military Industrial Complex to frame the foreign policy debate has lasted in this country for almost seventy years. With that power has come what I see to be their freedom from restraint by the three branches of our government. http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/17/a-real-history-of-the-last-sixty-two-years/#more-46802 It is therefore no surprise that talk as we may about the causes of and the dealing with, our troop’s tragic suicides, the obvious causation is overlooked. Stop the damn wars and bring our troop’s home. Use the positive skills taught them to help rebuild this countries economy and I believe they will flourish, rather than wither. This is easy for me to say, but the reality is that too many of our elite, whether corporations or military leaders, flourish under this mad system for them to relinquish it voluntarily. Until we as a people rise to impose our will upon those who have exploited our fears for their profit, I say please spare me your cant, or your sorrow for those driven to death by their despair in pursuit of your pointless wars, against chimerical foes, for the sole purpose of personal greed and status.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Dred wrote —
“Never mind that the DoD admits that 19,000 rapes of women soldiers take place each year, a figure disputed by watch-dog organizations that say the number is far greater.
“Never mind that only about 200 per year of those 19,000 rapists are prosecuted.
“Never mind that when prosecuted those rapists are given misdemeanor, not felony punishments, which are little more than a slap on the wrist.”
If life has no purpose, is there any honor in how it is lived?
DonS: A friend of mine had a bunch of little gifts given to him by the drug rep from Viagra. One of them was a little solar powered calculator, that when you pressed the “ON” button, would slowly RISE to an angle of 45 degrees so you could press the little numbers and do your calculations. My friend gave it to me and I gave it to my son — to use as a fun party trinket. He said once a bunch of friends had a few beers, he’d get a laugh out of that little gadget. (Gadget was the calculator…STOPPIT, YOU!)
Mike –
Thank you for articulating so well, what many of us feel all the way to the bone. When I allow myself to dwell on it, I find it quite maddening.
As medics in San Diego, we became almost inured to the countless thousands of incidences of military personnel suicides and near-suicides; the family violence; the drug use. The most heartbreaking of all were/are the homeless veterans, their frayed emotions bloodied, now living a zombie-like existence of nothing much making any sense at all. Their thrill of enlistment – of actually doing something that mattered – now seen as a perverse seduction called “protecting our freedom” – a monstrous trap so shamefully mislabeled by our militant foreign policy.
How many souls walk the halls of Balboa hospital & Veterans?
On a San Diego ambulance drive, the observant can witness a ghost on every street corner.
You are spot on, Mike, in quoting Dwight Eisenhower. Here are two other rather wise observations:
“”Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
“We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
(was he channeling unmanned drone aircraft & smart bombs?)
Be most accounts, Eisenhower was a “moderate” conservative of his time. How happy would Ike be today, 60 years later? I’m guessing he would be appalled.
The reality is, any of a thousand thoughtful leaders could have spoke these words. But the fact they were spoken by an Army General, a President, AND a conservative, is almost off-the-chart in its prescience.
Thanks again.
“What are we fighting for … don’t ask me I don’t give a damn …” (asked 40 years ago during another 1% war out on Highway 61).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuUBCF3KKxc&w=512&h=312]
DonS, My husband is a “pen nut”, too. He recently lost an old favorite. Glad there is another one out there.
What did I do, and how do I fix it? I see in my 12:42 comment I have the last italic going the wrong way. What?
On doctor’s perks: yes they have diminished. But over the years I saw a lot of it going on. Actually, I’m kind of a pen nut, and the secretaries and nurses used to save some the nicest pens that the drug reps brought around for me to look at. I might have one of the largest collectiosn of said items going, FWIW. Which ain’t much.
“When the truth is found to be lies … you better find someone to love …”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkoSPqjaU4&w=512&h=312]
Nope, so I guess one of the guest bloggers who have access to the dashboard needs to fix it.
Let’s see if this worked.
Dred — Oh is that what happened? My technology-bug stung again; I couldn’t figure it out. So how do we undo this?
HELP!
DonS left an unclosed italics code closer evidently.
Mike S,
One thing that needs to be done is to start telling them the truth:
(Etiology of Social Dementia, links removed). And start telling the public the truth too.
Lies have consequences.
Doctors are not getting perks from drug detail reps like they used to. Handing out an advertising coffee cup is now a big no-no, much less more serious perks. The big thing I am seeing these days is the drug rep bringing a lunch for the doctor’s office staff and they have an eating meeting while the drug rep shows a video and answers questions (aka makes a sales pitch).
Once I was seated on a plane next to a young military man that was headed back to Iraq. I was more than willing to show compassion, but he surprised me and said he had signed up again because he really liked going there.. He made a strong impression on me with all my anti-war sentiments.
SM, I know what you mean. Woosty, I know what you mean.
For no known (to me) reason, a lot of my friends are psychiatrists, psychologists, and other kinds of therapists. One of them is a specialist in psychopharm. He can put together a cocktail for you that will make you act just as you want to act. But usually, that is done for people who (a) are very wealthy and want to act like people who can continue to make the big bucks so they continue to grow wealthier; and (b) have enormous incentive to do what they call “succeed” even if that “succeeding” includes battering other people down so efficiently that their own ascendency in the pecking order is not negatively affected.
Another one of my friends is both a psychiatrist and an attorney, although he does not practice law. He does not prescribe medications very often but he does not believe that there is “no place for medications” in psychiatric treatment, either. He wanted me to try the SSRIs at one time, and I resisted, saying that I had given them a try and they did no good and prevented me from getting any sleep. He insisted I should give them another try and so I did, but got no benefit, and then he agreed with me that I should quit, which I did, after telling my doctor that I was not willing to keep wasting them.
In the end we had a good conversation about what the problem was. I said that I did not consider myself “normally depressed” and so it would not yield to “normal treatment for depression.”
I explained that my “depression” was only “depressive realism.” I think I said something like: “If I could change these outrageous circumstances, I would not be depressed or, if I was, it would be a very tolerable level of depression, needing only moderate and unremarkable treatment, like exercise and music or something. No meds. Being unable to change these outrageous circumstances, however, no amount of talk ‘therapy’ can be therapeutic and no meds can change my take on things. Things are not worse than I believe them to be; they are AS BAD AS I BELIEVE THEM TO BE, do you agree?”
He said, simply, “yes.”
I said, “So if my take on these circumstances is accurate, how could I medicate my way out of this depression?”
War, actually, is WORSE than the circumstances I find myself in. I don’t care WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES I FIND MYSELF IN; war is WORSE.
WAR IS WORSE.
That keeps me alive some nights, you know? So what could I say to someone who has been to war? Every one of them may be in the position Primo Levi was in when he died. How could I even imagine what they are going through? Why is this not obvious to the LOTUS? That was, of course, the point of the article. The excellent article.
You were lucky. My bc/bs does not pay for any length of time,. not sure what the medicare payment or permission is.
It is obvious that some miss the point….. Some on purpose and some through no fault of their own……
This is what happens when corporations play such a huge role in determining foreign policy. The 99% are expendable so that the 1% may have open shipping lanes, unhindered access to any natural resources in any country, and ever-expanding profits.
Arab extremists are a threat to the expansion of profit for the 1% so government is tasked by the corporations to set a foreign policy that justifies war.
Suicide bombers are a threat to commerce but American soldiers committing suicide … the 1% could give a *%&* … so could the government who set this keep-the-profits-growing foreign policy. They are sticking with it despite the unbelievable and obvious damage being done to their own so, as far as I’m concerned, Panetta’s words mean nothing.
I support every effort being made to get the help that is needed to the vets … but Panetta and all those other corporation toadies we call our government leadership … liars.
lee, When I went to therapy years ago, it was all paid for.
And Wootsy talk therapy does not get paid for, at least for any length of time. (I like that pun, chemical weapons)