Showing posts with label Mental Health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mental Health. Show all posts
Monday, July 14, 2014
Hearing on Veteran's Administration and Mental Health Care
Here is the link to C-Span and the hearing http://www.c-span.org/video/?320367-1/hearing-mental-health-care-access-veterans
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Federal court reverses order to overhaul VA treatment system
SAN FRANCISCO — In a major setback for suffering combat veterans, a federal appeals court on Monday found that Congress, not the courts, is responsible for fixing the VA’s troubled mental health care system, overturning a previous court that found the program riddled with “unchecked incompetence.”
In a 10-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit that sought to force the Department of Veterans Affairs to overhaul the treatment program and reversed an earlier ruling that would have forced the government to speed up treatment requests and benefit claims.
Read the entire story here.
In a 10-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit that sought to force the Department of Veterans Affairs to overhaul the treatment program and reversed an earlier ruling that would have forced the government to speed up treatment requests and benefit claims.
Read the entire story here.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
G.I.'s Describe Despair and Isolation in Trauma Units
COLORADO SPRINGS — A year ago, Specialist Michael Crawford wanted nothing more than to get into Fort Carson’s Warrior Transition Battalion, a special unit created to provide closely managed care for soldiers with physical wounds and severe psychological trauma.
A strapping Army sniper who once brimmed with confidence, he had returned emotionally broken from Iraq, where he suffered two concussions from roadside bombs and watched several platoon mates burn to death. The transition unit at Fort Carson, outside Colorado Springs, seemed the surest way to keep suicidal thoughts at bay, his mother thought.
Click here to read the rest of the story in the New York Times.
A strapping Army sniper who once brimmed with confidence, he had returned emotionally broken from Iraq, where he suffered two concussions from roadside bombs and watched several platoon mates burn to death. The transition unit at Fort Carson, outside Colorado Springs, seemed the surest way to keep suicidal thoughts at bay, his mother thought.
Click here to read the rest of the story in the New York Times.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Are Veterans Being Given Deadly Cocktails to Treat PTSD?
A potentially deadly drug manufactured by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has been linked to the deaths of soldiers returning from war. Yet the FDA continues to approve it.
March 6, 2010
Sgt. Eric Layne's death was not pretty.
A few months after starting a drug regimen combining the antidepressant Paxil, the mood stabilizer Klonopin and a controversial anti-psychotic drug manufactured by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, Seroquel, the Iraq war veteran was "suffering from incontinence, severe depression [and] continuous headaches," according to his widow, Janette Layne.
Read the rest of this article by clicking here.
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Hearing on Exploring the Relationship Between Medication and Veteran Suicide.
March 6, 2010
Sgt. Eric Layne's death was not pretty.
A few months after starting a drug regimen combining the antidepressant Paxil, the mood stabilizer Klonopin and a controversial anti-psychotic drug manufactured by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, Seroquel, the Iraq war veteran was "suffering from incontinence, severe depression [and] continuous headaches," according to his widow, Janette Layne.
Read the rest of this article by clicking here.
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Hearing on Exploring the Relationship Between Medication and Veteran Suicide.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
The Case of PVT. Nicholas Davis: Another Hanging in the Barracks
Picking up Patterns in Military “Investigations” of Non-combat Deaths: Part 3:
This is the narration of events as written by Nicholas' mother, Kim Slapak Smith:
Nicholas signed up for the Army on June 24, 2003 through the Delayed Entry Program when he was 17 years old. On January 20, 2004, in the middle of his senior year, he left for basic training. He was the youngest one in his platoon; (Ruff Ryder, A. Co. 1 - 19th INF, ITB, 9075 Holcomb Dr., Ft. Benning, GA 31905) he excelled at PT and was asked to help those soldiers who couldn’t keep up. Nicholas entered Jump School at Ft. Benning on May 10th. On May 25th his parachute failed and he fell 1250 feet. Amazingly, he did not die; however, his left ankle was severely injured, resulting in surgery and permanent damage.
Ironically, his parachute and gear were missing when his father inquired about it the next day.
Despite his injured status, Nick was sent to Fort Wainwright, Alaska in July 2004. We, as parents, wondered who ordered that? How did he pass a physical to go? What was the plan for him when he got there? Nicholas was just 18 years and one month old at the time and had no counseling regarding the parachute accident and possible post traumatic stress.
When Nick arrived in Alaska he was in an air-cast and on crutches. It is my belief that this is when he began enduring abuse from his sergeants and others in his platoon. This unit was preparing to deploy to Iraq and Nick, who was still holding a Ranger status, was not fit for battle or even for regular duty. He held odd jobs within his unit for a while and then with the permission of someone on Ft. Wainwright, enrolled in The University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
His reassignment of barracks seemed fishy to me. They moved him across base where he would have to travel to get to the mess hall. I remember him talking about how hard it was for him to get around, how those who were assigned to give him rides and help him out were not doing well by him. I remember talking about for us (me, Nick’s father and his Aunt Becky in the Navy) the military was like a family; we took care of each other. But it wasn’t like that for Nick.
The sergeants and fellow soldiers in A Co., 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, Ft. Wainwright, AK began tormenting and threatening one of their own. A portion of his unit even paid a visit to one of Nick's friends from college, threatening to beat him up if he did not stop associating with Nick. He was an injured, isolated soldier who wanted to serve his country however he could. He would have done anything in his power to remain one of the elite. But he was no good to his unit and they saw him as an easy target. He feared for his life several times. It became hell for him and Nicholas saw no way to survive other than to leave.
Nick went AWOL for the month of February 2005. He was set up by an acquaintance and caught by his company commander and the MP's. It was reported to me that he was not taken in easily. The MP's turned their backs while the unit beat him up. It was soon after this that Nicholas attempted suicide. I've been told that the mental ward was where my son felt safe. After a couple of weeks he was returned to his unit. In April he left again, this time flying to his home town in West Virginia. He stayed with some friends, got a job and enrolled in college. But Nick was a patriot and knew the commitment he had made. He decided to return to the Army, hoping that he would not be sent back to his unit in Alaska.
He was taken to the US Army Personnel Control Facility (PCF), US Army Armor Center, Ft. Knox, KY. The day he arrived. near the end of May, he signed paperwork for a dishonorable discharge in lieu of a court martial. Somehow, the abuse he suffered in Alaska found him at Ft. Knox. On June 15th he was admitted to a hospital in Radcliff, KY for another suicide attempt.
Again, he chose the safety of the mental ward. On June 27th his discharge was approved. Nick was released from the hospital on July 12th. He made arrangements to go home on the 14th but he never made it. Nicholas was murdered in the latrine and hung on the back of a latrine door in the 7pm hour of July 13, 2005.
My son was a young soldier who should have been protected and mentored by anyone his senior. He was an eager learner with desires to help people. After the parachute accident he somehow slipped through the cracks of the system and all of a sudden no one knew what to do with him. One commander after another let him slide through without concern for his well-being.
This is the narration of events as written by Nicholas' mother, Kim Slapak Smith:
Nicholas signed up for the Army on June 24, 2003 through the Delayed Entry Program when he was 17 years old. On January 20, 2004, in the middle of his senior year, he left for basic training. He was the youngest one in his platoon; (Ruff Ryder, A. Co. 1 - 19th INF, ITB, 9075 Holcomb Dr., Ft. Benning, GA 31905) he excelled at PT and was asked to help those soldiers who couldn’t keep up. Nicholas entered Jump School at Ft. Benning on May 10th. On May 25th his parachute failed and he fell 1250 feet. Amazingly, he did not die; however, his left ankle was severely injured, resulting in surgery and permanent damage.
Ironically, his parachute and gear were missing when his father inquired about it the next day.
Despite his injured status, Nick was sent to Fort Wainwright, Alaska in July 2004. We, as parents, wondered who ordered that? How did he pass a physical to go? What was the plan for him when he got there? Nicholas was just 18 years and one month old at the time and had no counseling regarding the parachute accident and possible post traumatic stress.
When Nick arrived in Alaska he was in an air-cast and on crutches. It is my belief that this is when he began enduring abuse from his sergeants and others in his platoon. This unit was preparing to deploy to Iraq and Nick, who was still holding a Ranger status, was not fit for battle or even for regular duty. He held odd jobs within his unit for a while and then with the permission of someone on Ft. Wainwright, enrolled in The University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
His reassignment of barracks seemed fishy to me. They moved him across base where he would have to travel to get to the mess hall. I remember him talking about how hard it was for him to get around, how those who were assigned to give him rides and help him out were not doing well by him. I remember talking about for us (me, Nick’s father and his Aunt Becky in the Navy) the military was like a family; we took care of each other. But it wasn’t like that for Nick.
The sergeants and fellow soldiers in A Co., 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, Ft. Wainwright, AK began tormenting and threatening one of their own. A portion of his unit even paid a visit to one of Nick's friends from college, threatening to beat him up if he did not stop associating with Nick. He was an injured, isolated soldier who wanted to serve his country however he could. He would have done anything in his power to remain one of the elite. But he was no good to his unit and they saw him as an easy target. He feared for his life several times. It became hell for him and Nicholas saw no way to survive other than to leave.
Nick went AWOL for the month of February 2005. He was set up by an acquaintance and caught by his company commander and the MP's. It was reported to me that he was not taken in easily. The MP's turned their backs while the unit beat him up. It was soon after this that Nicholas attempted suicide. I've been told that the mental ward was where my son felt safe. After a couple of weeks he was returned to his unit. In April he left again, this time flying to his home town in West Virginia. He stayed with some friends, got a job and enrolled in college. But Nick was a patriot and knew the commitment he had made. He decided to return to the Army, hoping that he would not be sent back to his unit in Alaska.
He was taken to the US Army Personnel Control Facility (PCF), US Army Armor Center, Ft. Knox, KY. The day he arrived. near the end of May, he signed paperwork for a dishonorable discharge in lieu of a court martial. Somehow, the abuse he suffered in Alaska found him at Ft. Knox. On June 15th he was admitted to a hospital in Radcliff, KY for another suicide attempt.
Again, he chose the safety of the mental ward. On June 27th his discharge was approved. Nick was released from the hospital on July 12th. He made arrangements to go home on the 14th but he never made it. Nicholas was murdered in the latrine and hung on the back of a latrine door in the 7pm hour of July 13, 2005.
My son was a young soldier who should have been protected and mentored by anyone his senior. He was an eager learner with desires to help people. After the parachute accident he somehow slipped through the cracks of the system and all of a sudden no one knew what to do with him. One commander after another let him slide through without concern for his well-being.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Parents of Soldier who Killed Himself in Iraq Speak Out
View the interview on video or read the transcript at Democracy Now!
Gregg and Jannett Keesling talk about the suicide of their son.
Gregg and Jannett Keesling talk about the suicide of their son.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
The Forgotten Casualties
May 22-24, 2009
Falling Through the Cracks of the Army's Duty of Care
By TED NEWCOMEN
It was just another tragic headline in a Florida newspaper, "Area woman killed in Iraq – Father confirms his daughter is third casualty in past three months". The article went on to describe how Army SPC Oprah Nestling, aged 24, (for reasons of confidentiality - not her real name or age), had been killed in combat overseas in January 2006. She was the third service member from the newspaper’s catchment area to become a fatality in as many months. No details were provided by the Department of Defense and her father declined to make any further comment.
Nestling’s name also briefly appeared as one of sixty-two service fatalities listed during the month of January 2006 on the website of the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (www.icasualty.org), along with the names of a number of marines who had been killed in the same IED (Improvised Explosive Device) attack.
However, a few days later her name was removed from the casualty list altogether and no further information appeared in the local paper. In the months that followed there was desultory 'chatter' on the internet speculating that there had been some sort of army cover-up. At the time lurid rumors were widespread about unexplained deaths of female military personnel both overseas and on bases in the US. Further investigation revealed that SPC Nestling had not been killed on active service in Iraq but was supposedly found slumped dead on the floor of a barrack room (not her own) at Ft.Bragg, North Carolina.
Delay & obfuscation by military authorities
Fast forward a year and a half and the Army was still refusing to make available any information about Nestling’s death following requests submitted thru the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The reason given was that an active investigation of the case was still in progress.
To read the entire story, click here.
Falling Through the Cracks of the Army's Duty of Care
By TED NEWCOMEN
It was just another tragic headline in a Florida newspaper, "Area woman killed in Iraq – Father confirms his daughter is third casualty in past three months". The article went on to describe how Army SPC Oprah Nestling, aged 24, (for reasons of confidentiality - not her real name or age), had been killed in combat overseas in January 2006. She was the third service member from the newspaper’s catchment area to become a fatality in as many months. No details were provided by the Department of Defense and her father declined to make any further comment.
Nestling’s name also briefly appeared as one of sixty-two service fatalities listed during the month of January 2006 on the website of the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (www.icasualty.org), along with the names of a number of marines who had been killed in the same IED (Improvised Explosive Device) attack.
However, a few days later her name was removed from the casualty list altogether and no further information appeared in the local paper. In the months that followed there was desultory 'chatter' on the internet speculating that there had been some sort of army cover-up. At the time lurid rumors were widespread about unexplained deaths of female military personnel both overseas and on bases in the US. Further investigation revealed that SPC Nestling had not been killed on active service in Iraq but was supposedly found slumped dead on the floor of a barrack room (not her own) at Ft.Bragg, North Carolina.
Delay & obfuscation by military authorities
Fast forward a year and a half and the Army was still refusing to make available any information about Nestling’s death following requests submitted thru the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The reason given was that an active investigation of the case was still in progress.
To read the entire story, click here.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Suicidal Soldiers
The murder of five U.S. soldiers by their comrade exposes the depth of the military's mental health troubles. Elspeth Reeve on why the culture of humiliation and stigma makes matters worse.
Read the entire story by clicking here.
This is a story about "unit watch" submitted by Richard Stites.
Read the entire story by clicking here.
This is a story about "unit watch" submitted by Richard Stites.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
US Soldiers Being Killed by Psychiatric Drugs
“I believe there are many more soldiers and Marines who have died in their sleep just like the four in West Virginia,” said Mr. White, a retired high school principal. “I think what we have found is just the tip of the iceberg, but we need more national publicity to help us find others who have lost loved ones and are looking for answers.”
Washington Times
EXCLUSIVE: After death of son, dad takes cases to Capitol Hill
HURRICANE, W.Va.
Andrea Billups and Audrey HudsonThursday, November 13, 2008
A West Virginia man whose son survived the battlefields of Iraq only to die in his sleep at home is crusading to find other military families whose loved ones also have died after taking drugs prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Read the entire story by clicking here.
Washington Times
EXCLUSIVE: After death of son, dad takes cases to Capitol Hill
HURRICANE, W.Va.
Andrea Billups and Audrey HudsonThursday, November 13, 2008
A West Virginia man whose son survived the battlefields of Iraq only to die in his sleep at home is crusading to find other military families whose loved ones also have died after taking drugs prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Read the entire story by clicking here.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Cornyn seeking probe into Army recruiter suicides
Senator cites 'very troubling' allegations
By LINDSAY WISE Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 9, 2008, 11:32PM
In March 2007, Sgt. Nils Aron Andersson, 25, shot himself to death in a Houston parking garage.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn on Thursday called for an independent probe into a string of suicides among Houston-based Army recruiters, citing "very troubling" allegations that the chain of command interfered with official investigations in order to cover up a toxic leadership climate and low morale.
The Houston battalion has lost five recruiters to suicide since 2001, including two in the past two months.
Cornyn, a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, detailed his concerns in a letter sent Thursday to Secretary of the Army Pete Geren.
In the letter, the Republican senator said he recently heard from numerous Army recruiters and their family members who claim to have direct knowledge of "serious problems" within the Houston battalion.
They told Cornyn that certain leaders in the battalion have attempted to block investigating officers from meeting with material witnesses and "strongly suggested" to subordinate officers that they should avoid portraying the chain of command in an unfavorable light, even if it meant lying in their statements to authorities.
"These allegations, if true, point to criminal misconduct punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice," Cornyn wrote. "In addition, such actions would absolutely undermine and call into question the findings and conclusions of these investigations.
Should these claims be substantiated, the relevant individuals must be held fully accountable for their misconduct and the resultant problems with the Houston Recruiting Battalion."
Cornyn said the constituents who contacted him also accused the battalion's senior leadership of "improper and unprofessional" practices such as mass punishment, organized hazing, and confrontational "counseling sessions," in which recruiters who fail to fill their monthly quotas are insulted and threatened with being kicked out of the Army.
'Cultural disconnect'
The senator said he's particularly disturbed by reports of unreasonably long work hours and seven-day weeks that have "constrained recruiters' family time and stressed their marriages."
Cornyn asked Geren to appoint an outside investigator to review the allegations and requested a copy of the report.
The senator said he also is concerned about a "cultural disconnect" between detailed recruiters, who are assigned to recruiting duty, and permanent recruiters, who choose recruiting as their military career speciality. Permanent recruiters are non-deployable, Cornyn said, and might have trouble relating to detailed recruiters under their command, many of whom recently served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said efforts to encourage permanent recruiters to volunteer for deployment don't go far enough, and suggested the Army reconsider its policy of granting permanent recruiters non-deployable status.
A spokesman for Geren's office, Lt. Colonel David Patterson Jr., said he would be unable to respond to written questions about Cornyn's letter before today. U.S. Army Recruiting Command and the Houston Recruiting Battalion declined to comment.
The battalion's three most recent suicides all occurred within the past year and a half.
Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Henderson, 35, hanged himself in a shed behind his house on Sept. 20. He died six weeks after another recruiter, Staff Sgt. Larry Flores Jr., 26, hanged himself in his garage.
Suicides on the rise
Henderson, an Iraq veteran, worked at a station in Longview. Flores, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was station commander in Nacogdoches. Both men belonged to the battalion's Tyler Company.
In March 2007, 25-year-old Sgt. Nils Aron Andersson shot himself to death in a Houston parking garage. Andersson, a two-tour Iraq veteran, was assigned to the Houston battalion's Rosenberg station.
The recruiters' deaths come at a time when suicides among all active duty soldiers are on track to set a record for the second year in a row. Last year, 115 soldiers committed suicide. By the end of August this year, 93 soldiers had killed themselves.
For the first time since the Vietnam War, the Army's suicide rate is on track to exceed that of the general U.S. population, Army officials say.
Amid intensive efforts to reduce overall suicides, however, little attention has so far been paid to the unique pressures facing returning veterans assigned to high-stress noncombat jobs like recruiting.
In the wake of the suicides at the Houston battalion, that could change, veterans advocates say.
"The mental health toll of this war is really high, and especially if they've done two tours or more, that's a recipe for disaster," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.
lindsay.wise@chron.com
RESOURCES FOR SOLDIERS, FAMILIES
• Veterans experiencing emotional and suicidal crisis, as well as their concerned family members or friends, have immediate access to emergency counseling services 24 hours a day, seven days a week by calling 800-273-TALK (8255).
• For information on suicide warning signs visit http://www.behavioralhealth.army.mil/
• The Army's Battlemind Training System is a mental health awareness and education program that helps prepare soldiers and their families for the stresses of war and assists with the detection of possible mental health issues before and after deployment. Visit http://www.battlemind.org/ .
• Soldiers in crisis should talk to their chaplain, chain of command or a fellow soldier immediately. They may also call Military OneSource at 800-342-9647 or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-SUICIDE.
• Call the Wounded Soldier and Family Hotline at 800-984-8523or e-mail wsfsupport@conus.army.mil
RELATED ITEMS Widow pleads for recruiting overhaul See Cornyn's follow-up letter to the Army Houston soldiers' suicides prompt scrutiny Cornyn voices concerns in Sept. 25 letter to Army One Houston Army recruiter's pain leads to two suicides (May 18)
Annual number of suicides of active-duty soldiers since 2000 The Army's rising suicide rate
By LINDSAY WISE Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 9, 2008, 11:32PM
In March 2007, Sgt. Nils Aron Andersson, 25, shot himself to death in a Houston parking garage.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn on Thursday called for an independent probe into a string of suicides among Houston-based Army recruiters, citing "very troubling" allegations that the chain of command interfered with official investigations in order to cover up a toxic leadership climate and low morale.
The Houston battalion has lost five recruiters to suicide since 2001, including two in the past two months.
Cornyn, a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, detailed his concerns in a letter sent Thursday to Secretary of the Army Pete Geren.
In the letter, the Republican senator said he recently heard from numerous Army recruiters and their family members who claim to have direct knowledge of "serious problems" within the Houston battalion.
They told Cornyn that certain leaders in the battalion have attempted to block investigating officers from meeting with material witnesses and "strongly suggested" to subordinate officers that they should avoid portraying the chain of command in an unfavorable light, even if it meant lying in their statements to authorities.
"These allegations, if true, point to criminal misconduct punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice," Cornyn wrote. "In addition, such actions would absolutely undermine and call into question the findings and conclusions of these investigations.
Should these claims be substantiated, the relevant individuals must be held fully accountable for their misconduct and the resultant problems with the Houston Recruiting Battalion."
Cornyn said the constituents who contacted him also accused the battalion's senior leadership of "improper and unprofessional" practices such as mass punishment, organized hazing, and confrontational "counseling sessions," in which recruiters who fail to fill their monthly quotas are insulted and threatened with being kicked out of the Army.
'Cultural disconnect'
The senator said he's particularly disturbed by reports of unreasonably long work hours and seven-day weeks that have "constrained recruiters' family time and stressed their marriages."
Cornyn asked Geren to appoint an outside investigator to review the allegations and requested a copy of the report.
The senator said he also is concerned about a "cultural disconnect" between detailed recruiters, who are assigned to recruiting duty, and permanent recruiters, who choose recruiting as their military career speciality. Permanent recruiters are non-deployable, Cornyn said, and might have trouble relating to detailed recruiters under their command, many of whom recently served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said efforts to encourage permanent recruiters to volunteer for deployment don't go far enough, and suggested the Army reconsider its policy of granting permanent recruiters non-deployable status.
A spokesman for Geren's office, Lt. Colonel David Patterson Jr., said he would be unable to respond to written questions about Cornyn's letter before today. U.S. Army Recruiting Command and the Houston Recruiting Battalion declined to comment.
The battalion's three most recent suicides all occurred within the past year and a half.
Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Henderson, 35, hanged himself in a shed behind his house on Sept. 20. He died six weeks after another recruiter, Staff Sgt. Larry Flores Jr., 26, hanged himself in his garage.
Suicides on the rise
Henderson, an Iraq veteran, worked at a station in Longview. Flores, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was station commander in Nacogdoches. Both men belonged to the battalion's Tyler Company.
In March 2007, 25-year-old Sgt. Nils Aron Andersson shot himself to death in a Houston parking garage. Andersson, a two-tour Iraq veteran, was assigned to the Houston battalion's Rosenberg station.
The recruiters' deaths come at a time when suicides among all active duty soldiers are on track to set a record for the second year in a row. Last year, 115 soldiers committed suicide. By the end of August this year, 93 soldiers had killed themselves.
For the first time since the Vietnam War, the Army's suicide rate is on track to exceed that of the general U.S. population, Army officials say.
Amid intensive efforts to reduce overall suicides, however, little attention has so far been paid to the unique pressures facing returning veterans assigned to high-stress noncombat jobs like recruiting.
In the wake of the suicides at the Houston battalion, that could change, veterans advocates say.
"The mental health toll of this war is really high, and especially if they've done two tours or more, that's a recipe for disaster," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.
lindsay.wise@chron.com
RESOURCES FOR SOLDIERS, FAMILIES
• Veterans experiencing emotional and suicidal crisis, as well as their concerned family members or friends, have immediate access to emergency counseling services 24 hours a day, seven days a week by calling 800-273-TALK (8255).
• For information on suicide warning signs visit http://www.behavioralhealth.army.mil/
• The Army's Battlemind Training System is a mental health awareness and education program that helps prepare soldiers and their families for the stresses of war and assists with the detection of possible mental health issues before and after deployment. Visit http://www.battlemind.org/ .
• Soldiers in crisis should talk to their chaplain, chain of command or a fellow soldier immediately. They may also call Military OneSource at 800-342-9647 or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-SUICIDE.
• Call the Wounded Soldier and Family Hotline at 800-984-8523or e-mail wsfsupport@conus.army.mil
RELATED ITEMS Widow pleads for recruiting overhaul See Cornyn's follow-up letter to the Army Houston soldiers' suicides prompt scrutiny Cornyn voices concerns in Sept. 25 letter to Army One Houston Army recruiter's pain leads to two suicides (May 18)
Annual number of suicides of active-duty soldiers since 2000 The Army's rising suicide rate
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Veteran Suicides: 18 every day, 1,000 attempts per month
Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day.
One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.
These are statistics that most Americans don't know, because the Bush administration has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has tried to present it as a war without casualties. In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones.
The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake, went to trial last month at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing briefs until May 19 and waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already having an impact.
That's because over the course of the two week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis effecting wounded soldiers.
"Shh!" begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA's Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.
"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" the e-mail concludes.
Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee immediately called for Katz's resignation. On May 6, the Chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA) convened a hearing titled "The Truth About Veteran's Suicides" and called Katz and VA Secretary James Peake to testify.
"That e-mail was in poor tone but the content was part of a dialogue about what we should do about new information," Katz said in response to Filner's questions. "The e-mail represents a healthy dialogue among members of VA staff about when it's appropriate to disclose and make public information early in the process."
Filner was nonplused and accused Katz and Peake of a "cover-up.""We should all be angry about what has gone on here," Filner said. "This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the problem will continue and people will die. If that's not criminal negligence, I don't know what is."
It's also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides weren't the only government statistics the Bush Administration was forced to reveal because of the class action lawsuit. Another set of documents presented in court showed that in the six months leading up to March 31, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.
Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also not revealed on a regular basis. For example, the Pentagon regularly reports on the numbers of American troops "wounded" in Iraq (currently at 31,948) but neglects to mention that it has two other categories "injured" (10,180) and "ill" (28,451).
All three of these categories represent soldiers who are so damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment, but by splitting the numbers up the sense of casualties down the public consciousness.
Here's another number that we don't often hear discussed in the media: 287,790. That's the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a disability claim with the Veterans Administration as of March 25th. That figure was not announced to the public at a news conference, but obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of Information Act.
Why all the secrecy? Why is it so hard to get accurate casualty figures out of our government?
Because the Bush Administration knows if Americans woke up to the real, human costs of this war they would fight harder to oppose it.
Think back to 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, when leading neoconservative thinker and Donald Rumsfeld aide Ken Adelman predicted the war would be a "cakewalk."Or consider this statement from Vice President Dick Cheney. Two days before the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert the war would "go relatively quickly, (ending in) weeks rather than months."
Today, those comments are gone but the motivation behind them remains. This is why the VA's head of mental health wrote "Shh!" telling a spokesperson not to respond to a reporters' inquiry.
But all the shhing in the world cannot stop the horrible pain that's mounting after five years of war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
Unpleasant Facts According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care. In its study, the RAND Corporation wrote that the federal government fails to care for war veterans at its own peril, noting post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury "can have far reaching and damaging consequences."
"Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, overeating, and unsafe sex and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality.
Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or report being less productive," the report said. "These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend the consequences of combat trauma across generations."
"These consequences can have a high economic toll," RAND said. "However, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. Yet, direct costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to mental health and cognitive conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families, and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full mental health have the potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly."
Bush and Congress have the power to stop this problem before it gets worse. It's not too late to extend needed mental health care to our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans; it's not too late to begin properly screening and treating returning servicemen and women who've experienced a traumatic brain injury; and it is not too late to simplify the disability claims process so that wounded veterans do not die waiting for their check. As the Rand study shows, this isn't only in the best interest of veterans, it's in the best interest of our country in the long run.
To start with, the Bush Administration needs to give us some honest information about the true human costs of the Iraq War.Aaron Glantz, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (UC Press) and Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Haymarket). He edits the website WarComesHome.org.
--submitted by Lois Vanderbur
One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.
These are statistics that most Americans don't know, because the Bush administration has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has tried to present it as a war without casualties. In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones.
The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake, went to trial last month at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing briefs until May 19 and waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already having an impact.
That's because over the course of the two week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis effecting wounded soldiers.
"Shh!" begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA's Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.
"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" the e-mail concludes.
Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee immediately called for Katz's resignation. On May 6, the Chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA) convened a hearing titled "The Truth About Veteran's Suicides" and called Katz and VA Secretary James Peake to testify.
"That e-mail was in poor tone but the content was part of a dialogue about what we should do about new information," Katz said in response to Filner's questions. "The e-mail represents a healthy dialogue among members of VA staff about when it's appropriate to disclose and make public information early in the process."
Filner was nonplused and accused Katz and Peake of a "cover-up.""We should all be angry about what has gone on here," Filner said. "This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the problem will continue and people will die. If that's not criminal negligence, I don't know what is."
It's also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides weren't the only government statistics the Bush Administration was forced to reveal because of the class action lawsuit. Another set of documents presented in court showed that in the six months leading up to March 31, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.
Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also not revealed on a regular basis. For example, the Pentagon regularly reports on the numbers of American troops "wounded" in Iraq (currently at 31,948) but neglects to mention that it has two other categories "injured" (10,180) and "ill" (28,451).
All three of these categories represent soldiers who are so damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment, but by splitting the numbers up the sense of casualties down the public consciousness.
Here's another number that we don't often hear discussed in the media: 287,790. That's the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a disability claim with the Veterans Administration as of March 25th. That figure was not announced to the public at a news conference, but obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of Information Act.
Why all the secrecy? Why is it so hard to get accurate casualty figures out of our government?
Because the Bush Administration knows if Americans woke up to the real, human costs of this war they would fight harder to oppose it.
Think back to 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, when leading neoconservative thinker and Donald Rumsfeld aide Ken Adelman predicted the war would be a "cakewalk."Or consider this statement from Vice President Dick Cheney. Two days before the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert the war would "go relatively quickly, (ending in) weeks rather than months."
Today, those comments are gone but the motivation behind them remains. This is why the VA's head of mental health wrote "Shh!" telling a spokesperson not to respond to a reporters' inquiry.
But all the shhing in the world cannot stop the horrible pain that's mounting after five years of war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
Unpleasant Facts According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care. In its study, the RAND Corporation wrote that the federal government fails to care for war veterans at its own peril, noting post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury "can have far reaching and damaging consequences."
"Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, overeating, and unsafe sex and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality.
Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or report being less productive," the report said. "These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend the consequences of combat trauma across generations."
"These consequences can have a high economic toll," RAND said. "However, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. Yet, direct costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to mental health and cognitive conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families, and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full mental health have the potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly."
Bush and Congress have the power to stop this problem before it gets worse. It's not too late to extend needed mental health care to our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans; it's not too late to begin properly screening and treating returning servicemen and women who've experienced a traumatic brain injury; and it is not too late to simplify the disability claims process so that wounded veterans do not die waiting for their check. As the Rand study shows, this isn't only in the best interest of veterans, it's in the best interest of our country in the long run.
To start with, the Bush Administration needs to give us some honest information about the true human costs of the Iraq War.Aaron Glantz, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (UC Press) and Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Haymarket). He edits the website WarComesHome.org.
--submitted by Lois Vanderbur
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Vets taking PTSD drugs die in sleep
Hurricane man's death the 4th in West Virginia
A Putnam County veteran who was taking medication prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder died in his sleep earlier this month, in circumstances similar to the deaths of three other area veterans earlier this year.
By Julie Robinson
Staff writer
A Putnam County veteran who was taking medication prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder died in his sleep earlier this month, in circumstances similar to the deaths of three other area veterans earlier this year.
Derek Johnson, 22, of Hurricane, served in the infantry in the Middle East in 2005, where he was wounded in combat and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder while hospitalized.
Military doctors prescribed Paxil, Klonopin and Seroquel for Johnson,the same combination taken by veterans Andrew White, 23, of CrossLanes; Eric Layne, 29, of Kanawha City; and Nicholas Endicott of LoganCounty. All were in apparently good physical health when they died in their sleep.
Johnson was taking Klonopin and Seroquel, as prescribed, at the timeof his death, said his grandmother, Georgeann Underwood of Hurricane.
Both drugs are frequently used in combination to treat post-traumaticstress disorder. Klonopin causes excessive drowsiness in some patients.
He also was taking a painkiller for a back injury he sustained in a car accident about a week before his death, but was no longer taking Paxil.
On May 1, the night before he died, Johnson called his grandfather, Duck Underwood, and asked if he could pick up his 5-year-old son and take him to school the next day. Johnson and his wife, Stacie, have three children, all under 6 years old. Their car had been totaled in the accident the previous week.
When Underwood arrived to pick up the boy the next morning, his knocks were not answered at first. He heard Stacie Johnson screaming. She opened the door and told him she couldn't wake her husband. They called paramedics, who could not revive him. Doctors did not declare an immediate cause of death.
Toxicology and autopsy results could take as long as 60 days, authorities told the family.
"I want to know the cause of death," said Ray Johnson, Derek's father." Stacie said he was fine that night. Everything was normal. He kissed her goodnight and went to sleep."
Stan White, father of soldier Andrew White, has become an advocate for families of returning veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
During his son's struggle with the disorder and since his death, White has tracked similar cases. He knows of about eight in the tri-state area of Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia.
He and his wife, Shirley, introduced themselves to the Johnsons and Underwoods at Derek's funeral and offered their help. He is in contact with the office of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who is a member ofthe Veterans' Affairs Committee.
Rockefeller requested an investigation into these deaths, which is ongoing, said Steven Broderick, the senator's press secretary.
"When I talked to his family about Derek, I realized it was the same old story," said White. "It was all too familiar. He was taking those same drugs as the others, and, yes, I believe they are still prescribing that combination."
After speaking with family members, White wonders if the patients are taking the medicine as prescribed. He said PTSD patients suffer short-term memory loss and shouldn't be relied upon to track their medications.
Georgeann Underwood agrees."You shouldn't put vulnerable, mentally unstable people on drugs like that," she said.
An outgoing, personable young man who worked at several jobs to support his young family, Johnson frequently was offered other jobs by customers in the stores where he worked, Underwood said.
In 2006, he returned from the Middle East depressed and short-tempered. Johnson had operated an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, or rapid-fire machine gun, and rarely spoke about his experiences there.
After his military prescriptions ran out, Johnson's medications were prescribed by private physicians because he refused to go the VA hospitals where he said he was required to wait long periods of time for appointments. His grandparents paid for his medications.
"He had a very short fuse," Ray Johnson said. "That was the biggest difference in his personality after he came back."
Until his death, he worked 12 or 16 hours a day. He was an electrical apprentice at the John Amos Power Plant until he was let go when his work hours approached the union limit for apprentices. He was on his way to apply for another job when the car he drove was rear-ended on April 24. Johnson died May 2.
To contact staff writer Julie Robinson, use e-mail or call 348-1230.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
A Putnam County veteran who was taking medication prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder died in his sleep earlier this month, in circumstances similar to the deaths of three other area veterans earlier this year.
By Julie Robinson
Staff writer
A Putnam County veteran who was taking medication prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder died in his sleep earlier this month, in circumstances similar to the deaths of three other area veterans earlier this year.
Derek Johnson, 22, of Hurricane, served in the infantry in the Middle East in 2005, where he was wounded in combat and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder while hospitalized.
Military doctors prescribed Paxil, Klonopin and Seroquel for Johnson,the same combination taken by veterans Andrew White, 23, of CrossLanes; Eric Layne, 29, of Kanawha City; and Nicholas Endicott of LoganCounty. All were in apparently good physical health when they died in their sleep.
Johnson was taking Klonopin and Seroquel, as prescribed, at the timeof his death, said his grandmother, Georgeann Underwood of Hurricane.
Both drugs are frequently used in combination to treat post-traumaticstress disorder. Klonopin causes excessive drowsiness in some patients.
He also was taking a painkiller for a back injury he sustained in a car accident about a week before his death, but was no longer taking Paxil.
On May 1, the night before he died, Johnson called his grandfather, Duck Underwood, and asked if he could pick up his 5-year-old son and take him to school the next day. Johnson and his wife, Stacie, have three children, all under 6 years old. Their car had been totaled in the accident the previous week.
When Underwood arrived to pick up the boy the next morning, his knocks were not answered at first. He heard Stacie Johnson screaming. She opened the door and told him she couldn't wake her husband. They called paramedics, who could not revive him. Doctors did not declare an immediate cause of death.
Toxicology and autopsy results could take as long as 60 days, authorities told the family.
"I want to know the cause of death," said Ray Johnson, Derek's father." Stacie said he was fine that night. Everything was normal. He kissed her goodnight and went to sleep."
Stan White, father of soldier Andrew White, has become an advocate for families of returning veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
During his son's struggle with the disorder and since his death, White has tracked similar cases. He knows of about eight in the tri-state area of Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia.
He and his wife, Shirley, introduced themselves to the Johnsons and Underwoods at Derek's funeral and offered their help. He is in contact with the office of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who is a member ofthe Veterans' Affairs Committee.
Rockefeller requested an investigation into these deaths, which is ongoing, said Steven Broderick, the senator's press secretary.
"When I talked to his family about Derek, I realized it was the same old story," said White. "It was all too familiar. He was taking those same drugs as the others, and, yes, I believe they are still prescribing that combination."
After speaking with family members, White wonders if the patients are taking the medicine as prescribed. He said PTSD patients suffer short-term memory loss and shouldn't be relied upon to track their medications.
Georgeann Underwood agrees."You shouldn't put vulnerable, mentally unstable people on drugs like that," she said.
An outgoing, personable young man who worked at several jobs to support his young family, Johnson frequently was offered other jobs by customers in the stores where he worked, Underwood said.
In 2006, he returned from the Middle East depressed and short-tempered. Johnson had operated an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, or rapid-fire machine gun, and rarely spoke about his experiences there.
After his military prescriptions ran out, Johnson's medications were prescribed by private physicians because he refused to go the VA hospitals where he said he was required to wait long periods of time for appointments. His grandparents paid for his medications.
"He had a very short fuse," Ray Johnson said. "That was the biggest difference in his personality after he came back."
Until his death, he worked 12 or 16 hours a day. He was an electrical apprentice at the John Amos Power Plant until he was let go when his work hours approached the union limit for apprentices. He was on his way to apply for another job when the car he drove was rear-ended on April 24. Johnson died May 2.
To contact staff writer Julie Robinson, use e-mail or call 348-1230.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Alabama Paper Reports Yet Another Iraq Vet Suicide -- With Mother Watching
By Greg Mitchell Published: May 06, 2008 9:30 PM ET updated Tuesday
NEW YORK As the scandal of suicide attempts by Iraq veterans expands -- in the face of Veterans Administration denials -- another horrific case has emerged, once again only gaining attention because of a local newspaper.
E&P has been tracking these accounts for almost five years and only recently has the problem, with an estimated 1,000 attempts a month now reported, gained wide media, and official, attention.
The latest story came Saturday in a story by Patrick McCreless in The Cullman Times of Cullman, Ala.
The headline is similar to so many others lately: "Family pushing for changes after soldier's suicide."
It tells how one Dorothy Screws "witnessed her only son, U.S. Army Pvt. Tommie Edward Jones, commit suicide right before her eyes six weeks ago in Colorado.
She says the Army, which promised to be there for Screws and her family to deal with the loss, has yet to provide assistance.
"Now Screws can hardly do her job without breaking down. Just the simple act of living is a challenge."
Only the memory of her son keeps Screws going as she fights to ensure another parent does not have to live through the same tragedy. 'I can’t save my son now ... I want to save somebody,' Screws said with tears in her eyes.
'If I can save one soldier, it will be worth it.'"
Screws plans to petition the government for as long as it takes until a law is passed requiring soldiers to undergo some type of psychological therapy after they return from intense combat."
Her son was 27 when he died.
An excerpt follows.
The whole article is still posted at http://www.cullmantimes.com/.*
One thing Screws and her family did not know until after her son’s death — which occurred March 25 at Fort Carson, Colo. — was that Jones, 27, had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from when he fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2007.
Jones mentioned a few of the traumatic events he experienced in Iraq to his mother shortly before his death.
“He said, ‘I wake up every morning angry,’” Screws said. “He said, ‘My body is here but my mind is in Iraq.’”
Screws said she wants therapy to be mandatory for soldiers because many, like her son, do not seek help out of fear of being stigmatized. She said Jones told her he did not want to talk to a therapist because he thought such action would prevent him from rising in rank.
...Jones’ sister, Amanda Wimberly, said her family was assigned an assistance officer. But Wimberly said the officer has been anything but helpful.
“I called her a few weeks ago and she was with her family ... but she could come by later if we wanted,” Wimberly said.
“We needed her then. I asked to speak to her boss. ... She fumbled with the phone and eventually hung up. I haven’t spoken to her since.”
Screws said she has already expressed her feelings about the Army and her petition for mandatory therapy to the local Democratic Party. She plans to attend an upcoming Republican Party meeting to do the same.
“I don’t care if I get in trouble,” Screws said. “Until somebody can answer some questions and make it right, oh yeah, I’ll keep talking.”
____E&P Editor Greg Mitchell's new book includes several chapters on this issue. It is titled, "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq."
--submitted by Patti Woodard
NEW YORK As the scandal of suicide attempts by Iraq veterans expands -- in the face of Veterans Administration denials -- another horrific case has emerged, once again only gaining attention because of a local newspaper.
E&P has been tracking these accounts for almost five years and only recently has the problem, with an estimated 1,000 attempts a month now reported, gained wide media, and official, attention.
The latest story came Saturday in a story by Patrick McCreless in The Cullman Times of Cullman, Ala.
The headline is similar to so many others lately: "Family pushing for changes after soldier's suicide."
It tells how one Dorothy Screws "witnessed her only son, U.S. Army Pvt. Tommie Edward Jones, commit suicide right before her eyes six weeks ago in Colorado.
She says the Army, which promised to be there for Screws and her family to deal with the loss, has yet to provide assistance.
"Now Screws can hardly do her job without breaking down. Just the simple act of living is a challenge."
Only the memory of her son keeps Screws going as she fights to ensure another parent does not have to live through the same tragedy. 'I can’t save my son now ... I want to save somebody,' Screws said with tears in her eyes.
'If I can save one soldier, it will be worth it.'"
Screws plans to petition the government for as long as it takes until a law is passed requiring soldiers to undergo some type of psychological therapy after they return from intense combat."
Her son was 27 when he died.
An excerpt follows.
The whole article is still posted at http://www.cullmantimes.com/.*
One thing Screws and her family did not know until after her son’s death — which occurred March 25 at Fort Carson, Colo. — was that Jones, 27, had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from when he fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2007.
Jones mentioned a few of the traumatic events he experienced in Iraq to his mother shortly before his death.
“He said, ‘I wake up every morning angry,’” Screws said. “He said, ‘My body is here but my mind is in Iraq.’”
Screws said she wants therapy to be mandatory for soldiers because many, like her son, do not seek help out of fear of being stigmatized. She said Jones told her he did not want to talk to a therapist because he thought such action would prevent him from rising in rank.
...Jones’ sister, Amanda Wimberly, said her family was assigned an assistance officer. But Wimberly said the officer has been anything but helpful.
“I called her a few weeks ago and she was with her family ... but she could come by later if we wanted,” Wimberly said.
“We needed her then. I asked to speak to her boss. ... She fumbled with the phone and eventually hung up. I haven’t spoken to her since.”
Screws said she has already expressed her feelings about the Army and her petition for mandatory therapy to the local Democratic Party. She plans to attend an upcoming Republican Party meeting to do the same.
“I don’t care if I get in trouble,” Screws said. “Until somebody can answer some questions and make it right, oh yeah, I’ll keep talking.”
____E&P Editor Greg Mitchell's new book includes several chapters on this issue. It is titled, "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq."
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Friday, April 11, 2008
Army under stress from long wars
By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer
Thu Apr 10, 2:15 AM ET
U.S. soldiers are committing suicide at record levels, young officers are abandoning their military careers, and the heavy use of forces in Iraq has made it harder for the military to fight conflicts that could arise elsewhere.
Unprecedented strains on the nation's all-volunteer military are threatening the health and readiness of the troops.
While the spotlight Wednesday was on congressional hearings with the U.S. ambassador and commanding general for Iraq, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody was in another hearing room explaining how troops and their families are being taxed by long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prospect of future years of conflict in the global war on terror.
"That marathon has become an enduring relay and our soldiers continue to run — and at the double time," Cody said. "Does this exhaust the body and mind of those in the race, and those who are ever present on the sidelines, cheering their every step? Yes. Has it broken the will of the soldier? No."
And it's not just the people that are facing strains.
Military depots have been working in high gear to repair or rebuild hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment — from radios to vehicles to weapons — that are being overused and worn out in harsh battlefield conditions. The Defense Department has asked for $46.5 billion in this year's war budget to repair and replace equipment damaged or destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Both the Army and Marine Corps have been forced to take equipment from non-deployed units and from pre-positioned stocks to meet needs of those in combat — meaning troops at home can't train on the equipment.
National Guard units have only an average of 61 percent of the equipment needed to be ready for disasters or attacks on the U.S., Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton lamented at Wednesday's hearing of the House Armed Services Committee.
Cody and his Marine counterpart, Gen. Robert Magnus, told the committee they're not sure their forces could handle a new conflict if one came along.
The Pentagon and Congress have worked in recent years to increase funding, bolster support programs for families, improve care for soldiers and Marines and increase the size of both forces to reduce the strain. Cody said the U.S. must continue the investment, continue to support its armed forces and have an "open and honest discussion" about the size of military that is needed for today's demands.
An annual Pentagon report this year found there was a significant risk that the U.S. military could not quickly and fully respond to another outbreak elsewhere in the world. The classified risk assessment concluded that long battlefield tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with persistent terrorist activity and other threats, are to blame.
The review grades the armed services' ability to meet the demands of the nation's military strategy — which would include fighting the current wars as well any potential outbreaks in places such as North Korea, Iran, Lebanon or China.
Similarly, a 400-page January report by the independent Commission on the National Guard and Reserves found the force isn't ready for a catastrophic chemical, biological or nuclear attack on this country, and National Guard forces don't have the equipment or training they need for the job.
Strain on individuals has been repeatedly documented.
It contributes to the difficulty in getting other Americans to join the volunteer military. The Army struggles to find enough recruits each year and to keep career soldiers.
Thousands more troops each year struggle with mental health problems because of the combat they've seen. The lengthening of duty tours to 15 months from 12 a year ago also has been blamed for problems as has the fact that soldiers are being sent back for two, three or more times.
President Bush will announce on Thursday that the length of tours will go back to 12 months for Army units heading to war after Aug. 1, defense officials said Wednesday.
Some 27 percent of soldiers on their third or fourth combat tours suffered anxiety, depression, post-combat stress and other problems, according to an Army survey released last month. That compared with 12 percent among those on their first tour.
In Afghanistan a range of mental health problems increased, and 11.4 percent of those surveyed reported suffering from depression.
Medical professionals themselves are burning out and said in the survey that they need more help to treat the troops. The report also recommended longer home time between deployments and more focused suicide-prevention training. It said civilian psychologists and other behavioral health professionals should be sent to the warfront to augment the uniformed corps.
Though separate data reported on divorce rates appeared to be holding steady last year, soldiers say they are having more problem with their marriages due to the long and repeated separations.
As many as 121 troops committed suicide in 2007, an increase of some 20 percent over 2006, according to preliminary figures released in January.
If all are confirmed that would be more than double the 52 reported in 2001, before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks prompted the Bush administration to launch the war in Afghanistan.
--submitted by Lois Vanderbur
Thu Apr 10, 2:15 AM ET
U.S. soldiers are committing suicide at record levels, young officers are abandoning their military careers, and the heavy use of forces in Iraq has made it harder for the military to fight conflicts that could arise elsewhere.
Unprecedented strains on the nation's all-volunteer military are threatening the health and readiness of the troops.
While the spotlight Wednesday was on congressional hearings with the U.S. ambassador and commanding general for Iraq, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody was in another hearing room explaining how troops and their families are being taxed by long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prospect of future years of conflict in the global war on terror.
"That marathon has become an enduring relay and our soldiers continue to run — and at the double time," Cody said. "Does this exhaust the body and mind of those in the race, and those who are ever present on the sidelines, cheering their every step? Yes. Has it broken the will of the soldier? No."
And it's not just the people that are facing strains.
Military depots have been working in high gear to repair or rebuild hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment — from radios to vehicles to weapons — that are being overused and worn out in harsh battlefield conditions. The Defense Department has asked for $46.5 billion in this year's war budget to repair and replace equipment damaged or destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Both the Army and Marine Corps have been forced to take equipment from non-deployed units and from pre-positioned stocks to meet needs of those in combat — meaning troops at home can't train on the equipment.
National Guard units have only an average of 61 percent of the equipment needed to be ready for disasters or attacks on the U.S., Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton lamented at Wednesday's hearing of the House Armed Services Committee.
Cody and his Marine counterpart, Gen. Robert Magnus, told the committee they're not sure their forces could handle a new conflict if one came along.
The Pentagon and Congress have worked in recent years to increase funding, bolster support programs for families, improve care for soldiers and Marines and increase the size of both forces to reduce the strain. Cody said the U.S. must continue the investment, continue to support its armed forces and have an "open and honest discussion" about the size of military that is needed for today's demands.
An annual Pentagon report this year found there was a significant risk that the U.S. military could not quickly and fully respond to another outbreak elsewhere in the world. The classified risk assessment concluded that long battlefield tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with persistent terrorist activity and other threats, are to blame.
The review grades the armed services' ability to meet the demands of the nation's military strategy — which would include fighting the current wars as well any potential outbreaks in places such as North Korea, Iran, Lebanon or China.
Similarly, a 400-page January report by the independent Commission on the National Guard and Reserves found the force isn't ready for a catastrophic chemical, biological or nuclear attack on this country, and National Guard forces don't have the equipment or training they need for the job.
Strain on individuals has been repeatedly documented.
It contributes to the difficulty in getting other Americans to join the volunteer military. The Army struggles to find enough recruits each year and to keep career soldiers.
Thousands more troops each year struggle with mental health problems because of the combat they've seen. The lengthening of duty tours to 15 months from 12 a year ago also has been blamed for problems as has the fact that soldiers are being sent back for two, three or more times.
President Bush will announce on Thursday that the length of tours will go back to 12 months for Army units heading to war after Aug. 1, defense officials said Wednesday.
Some 27 percent of soldiers on their third or fourth combat tours suffered anxiety, depression, post-combat stress and other problems, according to an Army survey released last month. That compared with 12 percent among those on their first tour.
In Afghanistan a range of mental health problems increased, and 11.4 percent of those surveyed reported suffering from depression.
Medical professionals themselves are burning out and said in the survey that they need more help to treat the troops. The report also recommended longer home time between deployments and more focused suicide-prevention training. It said civilian psychologists and other behavioral health professionals should be sent to the warfront to augment the uniformed corps.
Though separate data reported on divorce rates appeared to be holding steady last year, soldiers say they are having more problem with their marriages due to the long and repeated separations.
As many as 121 troops committed suicide in 2007, an increase of some 20 percent over 2006, according to preliminary figures released in January.
If all are confirmed that would be more than double the 52 reported in 2001, before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks prompted the Bush administration to launch the war in Afghanistan.
--submitted by Lois Vanderbur
Thursday, March 20, 2008
An Excerpt from the Winter Soldier Hearings
This past week, there has been another Winter Soldier event, similar to the one held during the Vietnam War. No mainstream media has covered this event, with the exception of The Washington Post. The coverage was minimal. Here is a statement by the parents of a soldier who committed suicide. You can read all the statements at DemocracyNow.org
JOYCE LUCEY: My name is Joyce Lucey, and I’m the mom of Corporal Jeffrey Michael Lucey. The last month of his life, he had this flashlight by his bedside, and he was looking for the camel spiders that he could hear running around the room. And when he went over to Iraq, he asked me to hold this coin for him every day, so he’d come home safely. I had no idea that it was after he came home that I should have been holding this coin.
Jeffrey’s death should never have happened. The young man, who in January of 2003 was sent to Kuwait to participate in an invasion in which he did not agree, was not the same young man that stepped off the bus in July. Our Marine physically returned to us, but his spirit died somewhere in Iraq. As we celebrated his homecoming, Jeff masked the anger, the guilt, the confusion, pain and darkness that are part of the hidden wounds of war behind his smile.
Jeff was in Kuwait with the 6th Motor Transportation Battalion. He was a convoy driver. On the 20th of March, he entered in his journal, which I have here, “At 10:30 p.m., a scud landed in our vicinity. We were just falling asleep when a shockwave rattled through our tent. The noise was just short of blowing out your eardrums. Everyone’s heart truly skipped a beat, and the reality of where we are and what’s happening hit home.” The last entry is, "We now just had a gas alert, and it’s past midnight. We will not sleep. Nerves are on edge.” The invasion had begun, and Jeff never had time to put another entry in.
Several months after his return, he said that he would like to complete it. We never knew that he did not—he would never get the time to do that. Our fear the whole time he was over there was that he would be physically harmed. We never imagined that an emotional wound could and would be just as lethal.
The letters we received from him were brief and sanitized. But to his girlfriend of six years, he said in April of 2003 he felt he had done immoral things and that he wanted to erase the last month of his life. “There are things I wouldn’t want to tell you or my parents, because I don’t want you to be worried. Even if I did tell you, you’d probably think I was just exaggerating. I would never want to fight in a war again. I’ve seen and done enough horrible things to last me a lifetime.” This is the baggage that my son carried with him when he stepped off that bus that sunny July day at Fort Nathan Hale, New Haven, Connecticut.
Over the next several months, we missed the signs that Jeffrey was in trouble. We had no way of knowing that during his post-deployment briefing at Camp Pendleton he was told to watch the direction that he was going in his survey, or else he’d be kept there another two to four months. He was careful from then on.
In July, he went to the Cape with his girlfriend, and she found him rather distant. He didn’t want to walk the beach. He later told a friend at college that he had seen enough sand to last him a lifetime. At his sister’s wedding in August, he told his grandmother, “You could be in a room full of people, but you could feel so alone.” He resumed college in 2003. That fall, we found out that Jeff had been vomiting just about every day since his return, and that kind of kept up right until the day he died.
On Christmas Eve, his sister came home early to see how he was doing. He had been drinking. He was standing by the refrigerator, and he grabbed his dog tags and he tossed them to her, and he called himself a murderer. We were to find out that these dog tags included two Iraqi soldiers that he feels—or he knows he’s personally responsible for their deaths. His private therapist, who saw him the last seven weeks of his life, said he didn’t wear them as a trophy, but he wore them to honor these men. He had a nightmare in February. He told me he was having a dream that they were coming after him in an alleyway. After his death, we kind of checked the VA records, and he had talked to them also about having nightmares in which he was running from alleyway to alleyway.
Spring break 2004 began, three months in which our family watched the son and brother we knew fall apart. He was depressed and drinking. When college classes resumed, he found attending classes very difficult. He had panic attacks, feeling that the other students were staring at him, even though he realized they weren’t. He was placed on Klonopin and Prozac to see if it could keep him in class. Jeff’s problems just worsened. He was having trouble sleeping, nightmares, poor appetite, isolating himself in his room. He was unable to focus on studies, so he could take his—so he could not take his finals. An excellent athlete, his balance was badly compromised by the mixture of Klonopin and alcohol.
He confided in his younger sister that he had a rope and a tree picked out near the brook behind our home, but told her, “Don’t worry. I’d never do that. I wouldn’t hurt Mom and Dad.” He was adamant that the Marines not be told, fearing a Section 8 and not wanting the stigma that is connected to PTSD to follow him throughout his life.
He finally went to the VA, after being assured that they were not part of the military and would not relay any information without Jeff’s permission. His dad called and explained what was happening with our son, and they said it was classic PTSD and that he should come in as soon as possible. The problem was getting Jeffrey to actually go in. It was—he kind of—every day it was “Tomorrow. I’ll go in tomorrow. I’m tired.” He just didn’t have the energy to get up. The day he went in, he blew up .328, and it was decided he needed to stay. As it was decided he needed to stay, it took six employees to take Jeffrey down. He had gotten out the door and ran out into the parking area.
Involuntarily committed for four days, the stay did nothing but make him feel like he was being warehoused. After seeing an admitting psychiatrist, he would not see another one until the day of his discharge. After answering in the affirmative that he was thinking of harming himself and revealing the three methods—overdose, suffocation or hanging—he was released on June 1st, 2003, a Tuesday. We found out later that he told them on Friday, the day that he was admitted, that he had a hose to choke himself. None of this was ever relayed to us.
They told us while he was there that he would not be assessed for PTSD until he was alcohol-free. But Jeffrey was using this alcohol as self-medication, and he had told us often that’s the only way he could sleep at night. That we might—and the VA said that we might have to consider kicking him out of the house so he would hit rock bottom and then realize he needed his help. That wasn’t an option for us.
On his discharge interview, Jeff said there were three phone calls that the psychiatrist took, one of them being just before he was going to tell her about the bumps in the road, the children they were told not to stop their vehicles for and just not to look back. He decided not to, after she took the call, feeling she wasn’t really interested.
On June 3rd, on a Dunkin’ Donut run—and this was two days after he was released from the hospital—he totaled our car. Was it a suicide attempt? We’re never going to know. No drinking was involved. I was terrified I was losing my little boy. I asked him where he was. He touched his chest, and he said, “Right here, Mom.”
On the 5th, he arrived at HCC, Holyoke Community College, where he was a student. But because of not taking the finals, he would not be graduating. But he arrived there to watch the graduation of his sister. This was supposed to be his graduation also. How he drove his car there, we’ll never know. He was so impaired. We managed to get him home, but his behavior got worse. He was very depressed.
My parents, who saw their grandson often, never saw him like this. His sisters and brother-in-law and my dad took him back to the VA. He did not want my husband to go, because he felt he was going to be involuntarily committed again. They were waiting for him, but he refused to go in the building. He was intelligent, didn’t want to get committed again like the weekend before. They decided, without consulting someone with the authority to commit him involuntarily, that he was neither suicidal or homicidal, there was nothing they could do. Our daughters called home in a panic saying it didn’t look like they were going to keep their brother. In their records, they say the grandfather pleaded for someone to help his grandson. Neither our veterans nor their families should ever have to beg for the care they should be entitled to.
My father lost his only brother in World War II. He was twenty-two years old. He was now watching his only grandson self-destructing at twenty-three because of another war.
Kevin and I went through the rooms when we knew Jeff was coming back. We took his knives, bottles, anything we felt he could harm himself with, a dog leash. I took a stepstool, anything that I thought could trigger something in his mind. His car was disabled not only to protect himself, but to protect others from Jeffrey. Kevin called the civilian authorities. They said they can’t—“We can’t touch him. He’s drinking.” My child was struggling to survive, and we didn’t know who to turn to. There was no follow-up call from the VA, no outreach, though they knew he was in crisis. We had no guidance—what to say to him, how to handle his situation. You hear a lot about supporting our troops, but I’ll tell you: we felt isolated, abandoned and alone.
While the rest of the country lived on, going to Disney World, shopping, living their daily lives, our days consisted of constant fear, apprehension, helplessness, while we watched this young man being consumed by this cancer that ravaged his soul. I sat on the deck with this person who was impersonating my son and listened to him while he recounted bits and pieces of his time in Iraq. Then he would grind his fist into his hand, and he’d say, “You could never understand.”
On Friday, June 11th, around midnight, my daughter got a call from a girl down the street. She asked me, “Where’s your son?” And I said, “Debs, he’s in his room. He’s sleeping.” Well, apparently not. He had climbed out the window and gotten into this girl’s car. He wanted some beer. She was—this girl who had known Jeffrey all her life was a little bit scared of him. When I saw him get out of the car, I froze. Jeff was in—dressed in his cammies with two k-bars, a modified pellet gun, which the police wouldn’t know, and carrying a six-pack. He had just wanted that beer. There was a sad smile on his face like a lost soul. When I told him how concerned I was about him, he said, “Don’t worry, Mom. No matter what I do, I always come back.”
KEVIN LUCEY: So later that evening, we had decided that we were going to try to go out, because he had become reclusive in the house. We were going to try to go out for a steak dinner the following night. At about 11:30, quarter to 12:00, Jeffrey asked me, for the second time within the past ten days, if he could just sit in my lap and I could rock him for about—well, for a while. And we did. We sat there for about forty-five minutes, and I was rocking Jeff, and we were in total silence. As his private therapist that we had hired said, it was his last harbor and his last place of refuge.
The next day, I came home. It was about quarter after 7:00. I held Jeff one last time, as I lowered his body from the rafters and took the hose from around his neck.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin and Joyce Lucey, their son, Marine Lance Corporal Jeffrey Lucey, served five months in Iraq in 2003 with the 6th Motor Transport Battalion. Almost a year later, he committed suicide, June 22nd, 2004. He was twenty-three years old.
JOYCE LUCEY: My name is Joyce Lucey, and I’m the mom of Corporal Jeffrey Michael Lucey. The last month of his life, he had this flashlight by his bedside, and he was looking for the camel spiders that he could hear running around the room. And when he went over to Iraq, he asked me to hold this coin for him every day, so he’d come home safely. I had no idea that it was after he came home that I should have been holding this coin.
Jeffrey’s death should never have happened. The young man, who in January of 2003 was sent to Kuwait to participate in an invasion in which he did not agree, was not the same young man that stepped off the bus in July. Our Marine physically returned to us, but his spirit died somewhere in Iraq. As we celebrated his homecoming, Jeff masked the anger, the guilt, the confusion, pain and darkness that are part of the hidden wounds of war behind his smile.
Jeff was in Kuwait with the 6th Motor Transportation Battalion. He was a convoy driver. On the 20th of March, he entered in his journal, which I have here, “At 10:30 p.m., a scud landed in our vicinity. We were just falling asleep when a shockwave rattled through our tent. The noise was just short of blowing out your eardrums. Everyone’s heart truly skipped a beat, and the reality of where we are and what’s happening hit home.” The last entry is, "We now just had a gas alert, and it’s past midnight. We will not sleep. Nerves are on edge.” The invasion had begun, and Jeff never had time to put another entry in.
Several months after his return, he said that he would like to complete it. We never knew that he did not—he would never get the time to do that. Our fear the whole time he was over there was that he would be physically harmed. We never imagined that an emotional wound could and would be just as lethal.
The letters we received from him were brief and sanitized. But to his girlfriend of six years, he said in April of 2003 he felt he had done immoral things and that he wanted to erase the last month of his life. “There are things I wouldn’t want to tell you or my parents, because I don’t want you to be worried. Even if I did tell you, you’d probably think I was just exaggerating. I would never want to fight in a war again. I’ve seen and done enough horrible things to last me a lifetime.” This is the baggage that my son carried with him when he stepped off that bus that sunny July day at Fort Nathan Hale, New Haven, Connecticut.
Over the next several months, we missed the signs that Jeffrey was in trouble. We had no way of knowing that during his post-deployment briefing at Camp Pendleton he was told to watch the direction that he was going in his survey, or else he’d be kept there another two to four months. He was careful from then on.
In July, he went to the Cape with his girlfriend, and she found him rather distant. He didn’t want to walk the beach. He later told a friend at college that he had seen enough sand to last him a lifetime. At his sister’s wedding in August, he told his grandmother, “You could be in a room full of people, but you could feel so alone.” He resumed college in 2003. That fall, we found out that Jeff had been vomiting just about every day since his return, and that kind of kept up right until the day he died.
On Christmas Eve, his sister came home early to see how he was doing. He had been drinking. He was standing by the refrigerator, and he grabbed his dog tags and he tossed them to her, and he called himself a murderer. We were to find out that these dog tags included two Iraqi soldiers that he feels—or he knows he’s personally responsible for their deaths. His private therapist, who saw him the last seven weeks of his life, said he didn’t wear them as a trophy, but he wore them to honor these men. He had a nightmare in February. He told me he was having a dream that they were coming after him in an alleyway. After his death, we kind of checked the VA records, and he had talked to them also about having nightmares in which he was running from alleyway to alleyway.
Spring break 2004 began, three months in which our family watched the son and brother we knew fall apart. He was depressed and drinking. When college classes resumed, he found attending classes very difficult. He had panic attacks, feeling that the other students were staring at him, even though he realized they weren’t. He was placed on Klonopin and Prozac to see if it could keep him in class. Jeff’s problems just worsened. He was having trouble sleeping, nightmares, poor appetite, isolating himself in his room. He was unable to focus on studies, so he could take his—so he could not take his finals. An excellent athlete, his balance was badly compromised by the mixture of Klonopin and alcohol.
He confided in his younger sister that he had a rope and a tree picked out near the brook behind our home, but told her, “Don’t worry. I’d never do that. I wouldn’t hurt Mom and Dad.” He was adamant that the Marines not be told, fearing a Section 8 and not wanting the stigma that is connected to PTSD to follow him throughout his life.
He finally went to the VA, after being assured that they were not part of the military and would not relay any information without Jeff’s permission. His dad called and explained what was happening with our son, and they said it was classic PTSD and that he should come in as soon as possible. The problem was getting Jeffrey to actually go in. It was—he kind of—every day it was “Tomorrow. I’ll go in tomorrow. I’m tired.” He just didn’t have the energy to get up. The day he went in, he blew up .328, and it was decided he needed to stay. As it was decided he needed to stay, it took six employees to take Jeffrey down. He had gotten out the door and ran out into the parking area.
Involuntarily committed for four days, the stay did nothing but make him feel like he was being warehoused. After seeing an admitting psychiatrist, he would not see another one until the day of his discharge. After answering in the affirmative that he was thinking of harming himself and revealing the three methods—overdose, suffocation or hanging—he was released on June 1st, 2003, a Tuesday. We found out later that he told them on Friday, the day that he was admitted, that he had a hose to choke himself. None of this was ever relayed to us.
They told us while he was there that he would not be assessed for PTSD until he was alcohol-free. But Jeffrey was using this alcohol as self-medication, and he had told us often that’s the only way he could sleep at night. That we might—and the VA said that we might have to consider kicking him out of the house so he would hit rock bottom and then realize he needed his help. That wasn’t an option for us.
On his discharge interview, Jeff said there were three phone calls that the psychiatrist took, one of them being just before he was going to tell her about the bumps in the road, the children they were told not to stop their vehicles for and just not to look back. He decided not to, after she took the call, feeling she wasn’t really interested.
On June 3rd, on a Dunkin’ Donut run—and this was two days after he was released from the hospital—he totaled our car. Was it a suicide attempt? We’re never going to know. No drinking was involved. I was terrified I was losing my little boy. I asked him where he was. He touched his chest, and he said, “Right here, Mom.”
On the 5th, he arrived at HCC, Holyoke Community College, where he was a student. But because of not taking the finals, he would not be graduating. But he arrived there to watch the graduation of his sister. This was supposed to be his graduation also. How he drove his car there, we’ll never know. He was so impaired. We managed to get him home, but his behavior got worse. He was very depressed.
My parents, who saw their grandson often, never saw him like this. His sisters and brother-in-law and my dad took him back to the VA. He did not want my husband to go, because he felt he was going to be involuntarily committed again. They were waiting for him, but he refused to go in the building. He was intelligent, didn’t want to get committed again like the weekend before. They decided, without consulting someone with the authority to commit him involuntarily, that he was neither suicidal or homicidal, there was nothing they could do. Our daughters called home in a panic saying it didn’t look like they were going to keep their brother. In their records, they say the grandfather pleaded for someone to help his grandson. Neither our veterans nor their families should ever have to beg for the care they should be entitled to.
My father lost his only brother in World War II. He was twenty-two years old. He was now watching his only grandson self-destructing at twenty-three because of another war.
Kevin and I went through the rooms when we knew Jeff was coming back. We took his knives, bottles, anything we felt he could harm himself with, a dog leash. I took a stepstool, anything that I thought could trigger something in his mind. His car was disabled not only to protect himself, but to protect others from Jeffrey. Kevin called the civilian authorities. They said they can’t—“We can’t touch him. He’s drinking.” My child was struggling to survive, and we didn’t know who to turn to. There was no follow-up call from the VA, no outreach, though they knew he was in crisis. We had no guidance—what to say to him, how to handle his situation. You hear a lot about supporting our troops, but I’ll tell you: we felt isolated, abandoned and alone.
While the rest of the country lived on, going to Disney World, shopping, living their daily lives, our days consisted of constant fear, apprehension, helplessness, while we watched this young man being consumed by this cancer that ravaged his soul. I sat on the deck with this person who was impersonating my son and listened to him while he recounted bits and pieces of his time in Iraq. Then he would grind his fist into his hand, and he’d say, “You could never understand.”
On Friday, June 11th, around midnight, my daughter got a call from a girl down the street. She asked me, “Where’s your son?” And I said, “Debs, he’s in his room. He’s sleeping.” Well, apparently not. He had climbed out the window and gotten into this girl’s car. He wanted some beer. She was—this girl who had known Jeffrey all her life was a little bit scared of him. When I saw him get out of the car, I froze. Jeff was in—dressed in his cammies with two k-bars, a modified pellet gun, which the police wouldn’t know, and carrying a six-pack. He had just wanted that beer. There was a sad smile on his face like a lost soul. When I told him how concerned I was about him, he said, “Don’t worry, Mom. No matter what I do, I always come back.”
KEVIN LUCEY: So later that evening, we had decided that we were going to try to go out, because he had become reclusive in the house. We were going to try to go out for a steak dinner the following night. At about 11:30, quarter to 12:00, Jeffrey asked me, for the second time within the past ten days, if he could just sit in my lap and I could rock him for about—well, for a while. And we did. We sat there for about forty-five minutes, and I was rocking Jeff, and we were in total silence. As his private therapist that we had hired said, it was his last harbor and his last place of refuge.
The next day, I came home. It was about quarter after 7:00. I held Jeff one last time, as I lowered his body from the rafters and took the hose from around his neck.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin and Joyce Lucey, their son, Marine Lance Corporal Jeffrey Lucey, served five months in Iraq in 2003 with the 6th Motor Transport Battalion. Almost a year later, he committed suicide, June 22nd, 2004. He was twenty-three years old.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Soldier, After Bipolar Treatment and Suicide Attempts, Sent Back to War Zone
Published: February 11, 2008
7:30 AM ET
FORT CARSON A Fort Carson soldier who says he was in treatment at Cedar Springs Hospital for bipolar disorder and alcohol abuse was released early and ordered to deploy to the Middle East with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.
The 28-year-old specialist spent 31 days in Kuwait and was returned to Fort Carson on Dec. 31 after health care professionals in Kuwait concurred that his symptoms met criteria for bipolar disorder and “some paranoia and possible homicidal tendencies,” according to e-mails obtained by a Denver newspaper.
The soldier, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma surrounding mental illness and because he will seek employment when he leaves the Army, said he checked himself into Cedar Springs on Nov. 9 or Nov. 10 after he attempted suicide while under the influence of alcohol. He said his treatment was supposed to end Dec. 10, but his commanding officers showed up at the hospital Nov. 29 and ordered him to leave.
“I was pulled out to deploy,” said the soldier, who has three years in the Army and has served a tour in Iraq.
Soldiers from Fort Carson and across the country have complained they were sent to combat zones despite medical conditions that should have prevented their deployment. Late last year, Fort Carson said it sent 79 soldiers who were considered medical “no-gos” overseas. Officials said the soldiers were placed in light-duty jobs and are receiving treatment there. So far, at least six soldiers have been returned.
An e-mail sent Jan. 3 by Capt. Scot Tebo, the brigade surgeon, says the 3rd Brigade Combat Team had “been having issues reaching deployable strength” and that some “borderline” soldiers were sent overseas.
Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, was outraged.“If he’s an inpatient in a hospital, they should have never taken him out. The chain of command needs to be held accountable for this. Washington needs to get involved at the Pentagon to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
“First, we had the planeload of wounded, injured and ill being forced back to the war zone. And now we have soldiers forcibly removed from mental hospitals. The level of outrage is off the Richter scale.”
The soldier said that on Nov. 29, he was called to the office at Cedar Springs. His squad leader, his platoon leader, his Army Substance Abuse Program counselor and two counselors from Cedar Springs “came and ambushed me.”
He said an Army alcohol counselor told him alcoholism and anxiety could not stop him from being deployed. “They said, ‘You know what? Tough it out. All of us like to drink.’”
In the December e-mail, Tebo tells brigade leaders: “Evidently, while at Cedar Springs, he was started on psychiatric medications that should have made him non-deployable, but somehow no one was notified. He may have been pending a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but that information was not passed on at discharge. He deployed with his unit and has not been doing well here.”
In Kuwait, the soldier isolated himself. He said he had “racing thoughts” and couldn’t keep still.
“I was ... burning my fingertips with cigarettes, just anything to keep my mind off of things,” the soldier said.
“I had homicidal thoughts. I don’t know at the time if I intended on doing anything. But at the time, it was there, I had homicidal and suicidal thoughts.”
Since his return, he has been in treatment. He said his medical record contains a permanent profile for bipolar disorder, an illness that makes him unfit for military service. He is undergoing the process to be medically discharged from the Army.
--AP
7:30 AM ET
FORT CARSON A Fort Carson soldier who says he was in treatment at Cedar Springs Hospital for bipolar disorder and alcohol abuse was released early and ordered to deploy to the Middle East with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.
The 28-year-old specialist spent 31 days in Kuwait and was returned to Fort Carson on Dec. 31 after health care professionals in Kuwait concurred that his symptoms met criteria for bipolar disorder and “some paranoia and possible homicidal tendencies,” according to e-mails obtained by a Denver newspaper.
The soldier, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma surrounding mental illness and because he will seek employment when he leaves the Army, said he checked himself into Cedar Springs on Nov. 9 or Nov. 10 after he attempted suicide while under the influence of alcohol. He said his treatment was supposed to end Dec. 10, but his commanding officers showed up at the hospital Nov. 29 and ordered him to leave.
“I was pulled out to deploy,” said the soldier, who has three years in the Army and has served a tour in Iraq.
Soldiers from Fort Carson and across the country have complained they were sent to combat zones despite medical conditions that should have prevented their deployment. Late last year, Fort Carson said it sent 79 soldiers who were considered medical “no-gos” overseas. Officials said the soldiers were placed in light-duty jobs and are receiving treatment there. So far, at least six soldiers have been returned.
An e-mail sent Jan. 3 by Capt. Scot Tebo, the brigade surgeon, says the 3rd Brigade Combat Team had “been having issues reaching deployable strength” and that some “borderline” soldiers were sent overseas.
Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, was outraged.“If he’s an inpatient in a hospital, they should have never taken him out. The chain of command needs to be held accountable for this. Washington needs to get involved at the Pentagon to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
“First, we had the planeload of wounded, injured and ill being forced back to the war zone. And now we have soldiers forcibly removed from mental hospitals. The level of outrage is off the Richter scale.”
The soldier said that on Nov. 29, he was called to the office at Cedar Springs. His squad leader, his platoon leader, his Army Substance Abuse Program counselor and two counselors from Cedar Springs “came and ambushed me.”
He said an Army alcohol counselor told him alcoholism and anxiety could not stop him from being deployed. “They said, ‘You know what? Tough it out. All of us like to drink.’”
In the December e-mail, Tebo tells brigade leaders: “Evidently, while at Cedar Springs, he was started on psychiatric medications that should have made him non-deployable, but somehow no one was notified. He may have been pending a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but that information was not passed on at discharge. He deployed with his unit and has not been doing well here.”
In Kuwait, the soldier isolated himself. He said he had “racing thoughts” and couldn’t keep still.
“I was ... burning my fingertips with cigarettes, just anything to keep my mind off of things,” the soldier said.
“I had homicidal thoughts. I don’t know at the time if I intended on doing anything. But at the time, it was there, I had homicidal and suicidal thoughts.”
Since his return, he has been in treatment. He said his medical record contains a permanent profile for bipolar disorder, an illness that makes him unfit for military service. He is undergoing the process to be medically discharged from the Army.
--AP
Monday, February 04, 2008
High Rate of Soldier Suicide
The number of American soldiers who try to commit suicide is at an all time high, according to an independent study. And one Colorado Springs man says he may know why. Richard "Singe" Stites says his son, who was in the Army, took his own life seven years ago.
Private Nolan Edward Stites began his military career at Fort Carson. He began his training while he was still in high school.
Private Nolan was then transferred to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. It was there that he killed himself. He was just two days shy of his 19Th birthday.
According to Private Nolan's father, Nolan was not a sad kid.
His father called him a perfectionist. "He loved the outdoors. He was an expert marksman with all types of firearms and he was a good student", said Richard Stites.
Private Nolan also loved his country and knew at a ripe age he wanted to join the Army. But when he finally did, his dad says, his life crumbled beneath him.
"He lost his appetite and had trouble sleeping", said Richard Stites.
Private Nolan was depressed and told his dad he felt like killing himself. So Richard Stites ordered his son to seek help.
"The two main things that happen to people when they die from suicide is a feeling of not belonging and of being a burden", said Richard Stites.
The Army, Richard Stites believes, did not treat his son with compassion nor get him appropriate help. "I feel I never got the truth", said Richard Stites.
Richard Stites said he was told by his son's peers that their drill sergeant made Private Nolan feel foolish for being depressed. "Whatever was wrong with him, the treatment he received for 15 days, having my son running around in front of his peers with out his belt and boot laces, being made fun of, exacerbated the problem tremendously", said Richard Stites.
Richard Stites says there are probably hundreds of reasons why men and women in the military take their lives. But one of them he believes is because they're too embarrassed to come forward. "There's that stigma. They're afraid to get help", said Richard Stites.
Second, he believes soldiers being deployed time after time is simply unhealthy.
Last year, more than 2,000 soldiers tried to end their lives. Compare that to 2001, when nearly 500 soldiers attempted suicide.
Private Nolan Edward Stites began his military career at Fort Carson. He began his training while he was still in high school.
Private Nolan was then transferred to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. It was there that he killed himself. He was just two days shy of his 19Th birthday.
According to Private Nolan's father, Nolan was not a sad kid.
His father called him a perfectionist. "He loved the outdoors. He was an expert marksman with all types of firearms and he was a good student", said Richard Stites.
Private Nolan also loved his country and knew at a ripe age he wanted to join the Army. But when he finally did, his dad says, his life crumbled beneath him.
"He lost his appetite and had trouble sleeping", said Richard Stites.
Private Nolan was depressed and told his dad he felt like killing himself. So Richard Stites ordered his son to seek help.
"The two main things that happen to people when they die from suicide is a feeling of not belonging and of being a burden", said Richard Stites.
The Army, Richard Stites believes, did not treat his son with compassion nor get him appropriate help. "I feel I never got the truth", said Richard Stites.
Richard Stites said he was told by his son's peers that their drill sergeant made Private Nolan feel foolish for being depressed. "Whatever was wrong with him, the treatment he received for 15 days, having my son running around in front of his peers with out his belt and boot laces, being made fun of, exacerbated the problem tremendously", said Richard Stites.
Richard Stites says there are probably hundreds of reasons why men and women in the military take their lives. But one of them he believes is because they're too embarrassed to come forward. "There's that stigma. They're afraid to get help", said Richard Stites.
Second, he believes soldiers being deployed time after time is simply unhealthy.
Last year, more than 2,000 soldiers tried to end their lives. Compare that to 2001, when nearly 500 soldiers attempted suicide.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Soldier Suicides at Record Level: Increase Linked to Long Wars, Lack of Army Resources
By Dana Priest, Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who was waiting for the Army to decide whether to court-martial her for endangering another soldier and turning a gun on herself last year in Iraq, attempted to kill herself Monday evening. In so doing, the 25-year-old Army reservist joined a record number of soldiers who have committed or tried to commit suicide after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
"I'm very disappointed with the Army," Whiteside wrote in a note before swallowing dozens of antidepressants and other pills. "Hopefully this will help other soldiers." She was taken to the emergency room early Tuesday. Whiteside, who is now in stable physical condition, learned yesterday that the charges against her had been dismissed.
Whiteside's personal tragedy is part of an alarming phenomenon in the Army's ranks: Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121 soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006.
At the same time, the number of attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries in the Army has jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began. Last year, about 2,100 soldiers injured themselves or attempted suicide, compared with about 350 in 2002, according to the U.S. Army Medical Command Suicide Prevention Action Plan.
The Army was unprepared for the high number of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued far longer than anticipated. Many Army posts still do not offer enough individual counseling and some soldiers suffering psychological problems complain that they are stigmatized by commanders. Over the past year, four high-level commissions have recommended reforms and Congress has given the military hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its mental health care, but critics charge that significant progress has not been made.
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed severe stress on the Army, caused in part by repeated and lengthened deployments. Historically, suicide rates tend to decrease when soldiers are in conflicts overseas, but that trend has reversed in recent years. From a suicide rate of 9.8 per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 -- the lowest rate on record -- the Army reached an all-time high of 17.5 suicides per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2006.
Last year, twice as many soldier suicides occurred in the United States than in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, the Army's top psychiatrist and author of the study, said that suicides and attempted suicides "are continuing to rise despite a lot of things we're doing now and have been doing." Ritchie added: "We need to improve training and education. We need to improve our capacity to provide behavioral health care."
Ritchie's team conducted more than 200 interviews in the United States and overseas, and found that the common factors in suicides and attempted suicides include failed personal relationships; legal, financial or occupational problems; and the frequency and length of overseas deployments. She said the Army must do a better job of making sure that soldiers in distress receive mental health services. "We need to know what to do when we're concerned about one of our fellows."
The study, which the Army's top personnel chief ordered six months ago, acknowledges that the Army still does not know how to adequately assess, monitor and treat soldiers with psychological problems. In fact, it says that "the current Army Suicide Prevention Program was not originally designed for a combat/deployment environment."
Staff Sgt. Gladys Santos, an Army medic who attempted suicide after three tours in Iraq, said the Army urgently needs to hire more psychiatrists and psychologists who have an understanding of war. "They gave me an 800 number to call if I needed help," she said. "When I come to feeling overwhelmed, I don't care about the 800 number. I want a one-on-one talk with a trained psychiatrist who's either been to war or understands war."
Santos, who is being treated at Walter Reed, said the only effective therapy she has received there in the past year have been the one-on-one sessions with her psychiatrist, not the group sessions in which soldiers are told "Don't hit your wife, don't hit your kids," or the other groups where they play bingo or learn how to properly set a table.
Over the past year, the Army has reinvigorated its efforts to understand mental health issues and has instituted new assessment surveys and new online videos and questionnaires to help soldiers recognize problems and become more resilient, Ritchie said. It has also hired more mental health providers. The plan calls for attaching more chaplains to deployed units and assigning "battle buddies" to improve peer support and monitoring.
Increasing suicides raise "real questions about whether you can have an Army this size with multiple deployments," said David Rudd, a former Army psychologist and chairman of the psychology department at Texas Tech University.
On Monday night, as President Bush delivered his State of the Union address and asked Congress to "improve the system of care for our wounded warriors and help them build lives of hope and promise and dignity," Whiteside was dozing off from the effects of her drug overdose. Her case highlights the Army's continuing struggles to remove the stigma surrounding mental illness and to make it easier for soldiers and officers to seek psychological help.
Whiteside, the subject of a Post article in December, was a high-achieving University of Virginia graduate, and she earned top scores from her Army raters. But as a medic in charge of a small prison team in Iraq, she was repeatedly harassed by one of her commanders, which disturbed her greatly, according to an Army investigation.
On Jan. 1, 2007, weary from helping to quell riots in the prison after the execution of Saddam Hussein, Whiteside had a mental breakdown, according to an Army sanity board investigation. She pointed a gun at a superior, fired two shots into the ceiling and then turned the weapon on herself, piercing several organs. She has been at Walter Reed ever since.
Whiteside's two immediate commanders brought charges against her, but Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the only physician in her chain of command and then the commander of Walter Reed, recommended that the charges be dropped, citing her "demonstrably severe depression" and "7 years of credible and honorable service."
The case hinged in part on whether her mental illness prompted her actions, as Walter Reed psychiatrists testified last month, or whether it was "an excuse" for her actions, as her company commander wrote when he proffered the original charges in April. Those charges included assault on a superior commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping, reckless endangerment, wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a threat and two attempts of intentional self-injury without intent to avoid service.
An Army hearing officer cited "Army values" and the need to do "what is right, legally and morally" when he recommended last month that Whiteside not face court-martial or other administration punishment, but that she be discharged and receive the medical benefits "she will desperately need for the remainder of her life." Whiteside decided to speak publicly about her case only after a soldier she had befriended at the hospital's psychiatric ward hanged herself after she was discharged without benefits.
But the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, which has ultimate legal jurisdiction over the case, declined for weeks to tell Whiteside whether others in her chain of command have concurred or differed with the hearing officer, said Matthew MacLean, Whiteside's civilian attorney and a former military lawyer.
MacLean and Whiteside's father, Thomas Whiteside, said the uncertainty took its toll on the young officer's mental state. "I've never seen anything like this. It's just so far off the page," said Thomas Whiteside, his voice cracking with emotion. "I told her, 'If you check out of here, you're not going to be able to help other soldiers.' "
Whiteside recently had begun to take prerequisite classes for a nursing degree, and her mental stability seemed to be improving, her father said. Then late last week, she told him she was having trouble sleeping, with a possible court-martial weighing on her. On Monday night, she asked her father to take her back to her room at Walter Reed so she could study.
She swallowed her pills there. A soldier and his wife, who live next door, came to her room and, after a while, noticed that she was becoming groggy, Thomas Whiteside said. When they returned later and she would not open the door, they called hospital authorities.
Yesterday, after having spent two nights in the intensive care unit, he said, his daughter was transferred to the psychiatric ward.
Whiteside left two notes, one titled "Business," in which her top concern was the fate of her dog. "Appointment for the Vetenarian is in my blue book. Additional paperwork on Chewy is in the closet at the apartment in a folder." On her second note, she penned a postscript: "Sorry to do this to my family + friends. I love you."
Staff writer Anne Hull contributed to this report.
-- submitted by Lois Vanderbur
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who was waiting for the Army to decide whether to court-martial her for endangering another soldier and turning a gun on herself last year in Iraq, attempted to kill herself Monday evening. In so doing, the 25-year-old Army reservist joined a record number of soldiers who have committed or tried to commit suicide after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
"I'm very disappointed with the Army," Whiteside wrote in a note before swallowing dozens of antidepressants and other pills. "Hopefully this will help other soldiers." She was taken to the emergency room early Tuesday. Whiteside, who is now in stable physical condition, learned yesterday that the charges against her had been dismissed.
Whiteside's personal tragedy is part of an alarming phenomenon in the Army's ranks: Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121 soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006.
At the same time, the number of attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries in the Army has jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began. Last year, about 2,100 soldiers injured themselves or attempted suicide, compared with about 350 in 2002, according to the U.S. Army Medical Command Suicide Prevention Action Plan.
The Army was unprepared for the high number of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued far longer than anticipated. Many Army posts still do not offer enough individual counseling and some soldiers suffering psychological problems complain that they are stigmatized by commanders. Over the past year, four high-level commissions have recommended reforms and Congress has given the military hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its mental health care, but critics charge that significant progress has not been made.
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed severe stress on the Army, caused in part by repeated and lengthened deployments. Historically, suicide rates tend to decrease when soldiers are in conflicts overseas, but that trend has reversed in recent years. From a suicide rate of 9.8 per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 -- the lowest rate on record -- the Army reached an all-time high of 17.5 suicides per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2006.
Last year, twice as many soldier suicides occurred in the United States than in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, the Army's top psychiatrist and author of the study, said that suicides and attempted suicides "are continuing to rise despite a lot of things we're doing now and have been doing." Ritchie added: "We need to improve training and education. We need to improve our capacity to provide behavioral health care."
Ritchie's team conducted more than 200 interviews in the United States and overseas, and found that the common factors in suicides and attempted suicides include failed personal relationships; legal, financial or occupational problems; and the frequency and length of overseas deployments. She said the Army must do a better job of making sure that soldiers in distress receive mental health services. "We need to know what to do when we're concerned about one of our fellows."
The study, which the Army's top personnel chief ordered six months ago, acknowledges that the Army still does not know how to adequately assess, monitor and treat soldiers with psychological problems. In fact, it says that "the current Army Suicide Prevention Program was not originally designed for a combat/deployment environment."
Staff Sgt. Gladys Santos, an Army medic who attempted suicide after three tours in Iraq, said the Army urgently needs to hire more psychiatrists and psychologists who have an understanding of war. "They gave me an 800 number to call if I needed help," she said. "When I come to feeling overwhelmed, I don't care about the 800 number. I want a one-on-one talk with a trained psychiatrist who's either been to war or understands war."
Santos, who is being treated at Walter Reed, said the only effective therapy she has received there in the past year have been the one-on-one sessions with her psychiatrist, not the group sessions in which soldiers are told "Don't hit your wife, don't hit your kids," or the other groups where they play bingo or learn how to properly set a table.
Over the past year, the Army has reinvigorated its efforts to understand mental health issues and has instituted new assessment surveys and new online videos and questionnaires to help soldiers recognize problems and become more resilient, Ritchie said. It has also hired more mental health providers. The plan calls for attaching more chaplains to deployed units and assigning "battle buddies" to improve peer support and monitoring.
Increasing suicides raise "real questions about whether you can have an Army this size with multiple deployments," said David Rudd, a former Army psychologist and chairman of the psychology department at Texas Tech University.
On Monday night, as President Bush delivered his State of the Union address and asked Congress to "improve the system of care for our wounded warriors and help them build lives of hope and promise and dignity," Whiteside was dozing off from the effects of her drug overdose. Her case highlights the Army's continuing struggles to remove the stigma surrounding mental illness and to make it easier for soldiers and officers to seek psychological help.
Whiteside, the subject of a Post article in December, was a high-achieving University of Virginia graduate, and she earned top scores from her Army raters. But as a medic in charge of a small prison team in Iraq, she was repeatedly harassed by one of her commanders, which disturbed her greatly, according to an Army investigation.
On Jan. 1, 2007, weary from helping to quell riots in the prison after the execution of Saddam Hussein, Whiteside had a mental breakdown, according to an Army sanity board investigation. She pointed a gun at a superior, fired two shots into the ceiling and then turned the weapon on herself, piercing several organs. She has been at Walter Reed ever since.
Whiteside's two immediate commanders brought charges against her, but Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the only physician in her chain of command and then the commander of Walter Reed, recommended that the charges be dropped, citing her "demonstrably severe depression" and "7 years of credible and honorable service."
The case hinged in part on whether her mental illness prompted her actions, as Walter Reed psychiatrists testified last month, or whether it was "an excuse" for her actions, as her company commander wrote when he proffered the original charges in April. Those charges included assault on a superior commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping, reckless endangerment, wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a threat and two attempts of intentional self-injury without intent to avoid service.
An Army hearing officer cited "Army values" and the need to do "what is right, legally and morally" when he recommended last month that Whiteside not face court-martial or other administration punishment, but that she be discharged and receive the medical benefits "she will desperately need for the remainder of her life." Whiteside decided to speak publicly about her case only after a soldier she had befriended at the hospital's psychiatric ward hanged herself after she was discharged without benefits.
But the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, which has ultimate legal jurisdiction over the case, declined for weeks to tell Whiteside whether others in her chain of command have concurred or differed with the hearing officer, said Matthew MacLean, Whiteside's civilian attorney and a former military lawyer.
MacLean and Whiteside's father, Thomas Whiteside, said the uncertainty took its toll on the young officer's mental state. "I've never seen anything like this. It's just so far off the page," said Thomas Whiteside, his voice cracking with emotion. "I told her, 'If you check out of here, you're not going to be able to help other soldiers.' "
Whiteside recently had begun to take prerequisite classes for a nursing degree, and her mental stability seemed to be improving, her father said. Then late last week, she told him she was having trouble sleeping, with a possible court-martial weighing on her. On Monday night, she asked her father to take her back to her room at Walter Reed so she could study.
She swallowed her pills there. A soldier and his wife, who live next door, came to her room and, after a while, noticed that she was becoming groggy, Thomas Whiteside said. When they returned later and she would not open the door, they called hospital authorities.
Yesterday, after having spent two nights in the intensive care unit, he said, his daughter was transferred to the psychiatric ward.
Whiteside left two notes, one titled "Business," in which her top concern was the fate of her dog. "Appointment for the Vetenarian is in my blue book. Additional paperwork on Chewy is in the closet at the apartment in a folder." On her second note, she penned a postscript: "Sorry to do this to my family + friends. I love you."
Staff writer Anne Hull contributed to this report.
-- submitted by Lois Vanderbur
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Returned from Iraq and still at war
February 1, 2008
ERIC RUDER explains how the politicians are failing the soldiers they sent to war.
THE YOUNG men and women sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan who manage to return home physically intact tend to count themselves among the fortunate. But they soon learn that the struggle to return to the lives they left behind has just begun for them.
A small but growing segment of veterans is losing that battle. They find themselves confronted by inner demons--reliving memories of the horrors of war, dwelling on the loss of fallen comrades, and tormented by nervous systems that seem stuck in a constant state of high alert after all those months in the field.
Any number of indicators show the consequences of these hidden scars--substance abuse, unemployment, homelessness, suicide and murder.
A New York Times investigative series found 121 cases of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who committed or were charged with murder after returning from war. A third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives; a quarter were fellow servicemembers; and the rest were acquaintances or strangers.
During the six years before and six years after the war in Afghanistan began, homicides committed by active-duty personnel and recent veterans increased by 89 percent--from 184 to 349--according to the Times.
What stuns advocates for these troubled veterans, however, is the speed with which veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are showing up in these categories.
After a happy homecoming, 28-year-old Peter Mohan broke his collarbone in a car crash, touching off a downward spiral. When he moved to be closer to his wife, who had taken a new job, he suddenly found himself without friends--and privately warring with the post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his military service.
He couldn't find a job. He turned to drinking and flirted with suicide. And when his wife felt she had exhausted her ability to help him and asked him to move out, he ended up in a homeless shelter.
“While many Vietnam veterans began showing manifestations of stress disorders roughly 10 years after returning from the front, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have shown the signs much earlier,” the Associated Press reported.
The disproportionate number of veterans among the homeless is a well-established trend, dating from the Vietnam years. “Veterans have long accounted for a high share of the nation's homeless,” according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Although they make up 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless on any given day.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has identified about 1,500 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were homeless at some point in 2006--a small but growing proportion of the 336,000 veterans who were homeless that same year.
The VA contends it's doing what's necessary to help these veterans. It spends about $265 million annually on programs for homeless veterans. But compared to the $8 billion a month the U.S. is spending to put soldiers on the battlefield, the money for such programs--about 0.3 percent of annual war spending--is tiny.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE VA has also failed to address the epidemic of suicide among veterans--a fact starkly revealed by a CBS News investigation that found the Department of Defense grossly understates the number of veterans who take their own lives.
The Pentagon only acknowledges 130 self-inflicted fatalities among U.S. military personnel in Iraq since 2003, but the U.S. Army alone reported 97 suicides in 2006. CBS News found that there were at least 6,256 suicides by veterans of all eras in 2005--an average of 120 a week.
Veterans of all ages were twice as likely as non-veterans to commit suicide, but among 20- to 24-year-olds, the suicide rate for veterans was two to four times higher.
“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,” wrote Penny Coleman, the widow of a Vietnam veteran who committed suicide and author of a book entitled Flashback: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War.
“They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call 'accidental non-combat 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.'”
Politicians try to muzzle antiwar critics with the charge that they don't “support the troops”--at the same time that the military and political establishment has failed to address the basic needs of returning troops.
In reality, it's the antiwar movement that stands for both the immediate withdrawal of troops from harm's way--and increased funding for health and other services that veterans deserve and desperately need.
ERIC RUDER explains how the politicians are failing the soldiers they sent to war.
THE YOUNG men and women sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan who manage to return home physically intact tend to count themselves among the fortunate. But they soon learn that the struggle to return to the lives they left behind has just begun for them.
A small but growing segment of veterans is losing that battle. They find themselves confronted by inner demons--reliving memories of the horrors of war, dwelling on the loss of fallen comrades, and tormented by nervous systems that seem stuck in a constant state of high alert after all those months in the field.
Any number of indicators show the consequences of these hidden scars--substance abuse, unemployment, homelessness, suicide and murder.
A New York Times investigative series found 121 cases of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who committed or were charged with murder after returning from war. A third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives; a quarter were fellow servicemembers; and the rest were acquaintances or strangers.
During the six years before and six years after the war in Afghanistan began, homicides committed by active-duty personnel and recent veterans increased by 89 percent--from 184 to 349--according to the Times.
What stuns advocates for these troubled veterans, however, is the speed with which veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are showing up in these categories.
After a happy homecoming, 28-year-old Peter Mohan broke his collarbone in a car crash, touching off a downward spiral. When he moved to be closer to his wife, who had taken a new job, he suddenly found himself without friends--and privately warring with the post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his military service.
He couldn't find a job. He turned to drinking and flirted with suicide. And when his wife felt she had exhausted her ability to help him and asked him to move out, he ended up in a homeless shelter.
“While many Vietnam veterans began showing manifestations of stress disorders roughly 10 years after returning from the front, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have shown the signs much earlier,” the Associated Press reported.
The disproportionate number of veterans among the homeless is a well-established trend, dating from the Vietnam years. “Veterans have long accounted for a high share of the nation's homeless,” according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Although they make up 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless on any given day.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has identified about 1,500 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were homeless at some point in 2006--a small but growing proportion of the 336,000 veterans who were homeless that same year.
The VA contends it's doing what's necessary to help these veterans. It spends about $265 million annually on programs for homeless veterans. But compared to the $8 billion a month the U.S. is spending to put soldiers on the battlefield, the money for such programs--about 0.3 percent of annual war spending--is tiny.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE VA has also failed to address the epidemic of suicide among veterans--a fact starkly revealed by a CBS News investigation that found the Department of Defense grossly understates the number of veterans who take their own lives.
The Pentagon only acknowledges 130 self-inflicted fatalities among U.S. military personnel in Iraq since 2003, but the U.S. Army alone reported 97 suicides in 2006. CBS News found that there were at least 6,256 suicides by veterans of all eras in 2005--an average of 120 a week.
Veterans of all ages were twice as likely as non-veterans to commit suicide, but among 20- to 24-year-olds, the suicide rate for veterans was two to four times higher.
“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,” wrote Penny Coleman, the widow of a Vietnam veteran who committed suicide and author of a book entitled Flashback: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War.
“They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call 'accidental non-combat 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.'”
Politicians try to muzzle antiwar critics with the charge that they don't “support the troops”--at the same time that the military and political establishment has failed to address the basic needs of returning troops.
In reality, it's the antiwar movement that stands for both the immediate withdrawal of troops from harm's way--and increased funding for health and other services that veterans deserve and desperately need.
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