Suicide among veterans is an “absolute crisis”

According to the Times, 347 soldiers were killed last year, and 381 committed suicide.

Legislation to provide funds for the mental health of military personnel and veterans was removed from a Congressional bill last year for budgetary reasons. The Times comments:

Considering the two wars were declared and waged with scant attention to their full costs, lawmakers add insult to injury by invoking budget concerns for the traumatic needs of actual warriors.

The medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention testified before a House subcommittee this month that suicide among veterans is an “absolute crisis.”

A provision on mental health care for the military appears again in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011. It’s been approved by the House and needs final approval by the Senate. You can email your senator from the Senate contact information page. Senators are listed in order of state.

As a blogger wrote at the site where I found this photo, “The real question is, why don’t we care anymore?”

Update 7/26/10:
Tomgram: William Astore, Wars Don’t Make Heroes (TomDispatch.com)

By making our military a league of heroes, we ensure that the brutalizing aspects and effects of war will be played down. In celebrating isolated heroic feats, we often forget that war is guaranteed to degrade humanity. “War,” as writer and cultural historian Louis Menand noted, “is specially terrible not because it destroys human beings, who can be destroyed in plenty of other ways, but because it turns human beings into destroyers.”

Update 7/31/10:
Taking Calls From Veterans on the Brink (The New York Times)

[E]stimates, while not universally accepted, seem alarming. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, veterans account for about one in five of the more than 30,000 suicides committed in the United States each year. …

To critics, including some veterans advocates, the hot line is a necessary but last-ditch approach, a tourniquet for people with dire psychological wounds. Until the department develops more effective long-term programs to treat and prevent suicidal behavior, the numbers will continue to rise, they say. …

Janet Kemp, the department’s national mental health director for suicide prevention, said she was initially skeptical about the hot line. “I didn’t think soldiers would call,” she said. “But I was wrong. It’s kind of blown me away.”

The number is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You will be prompted to press 1.

Resources:

Image source: ZoBox Politix

The War Away From the Battlefields, The New York Times, July 22, 2010

Roger K. Pitman, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Dementia: What Is the Origin of the Association?, The Journal of the American Medical Association, June 9, 2010, Vol. 303, No. 22, pp. 2287-2288 (subscription required)