Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans
13 November 2007
(CBS) They
are the casualties of wars you don’t often hear about - soldiers who die
of self-inflicted wounds. Little is known about the true scope of
suicides among those who have served in the military.
But a five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that
shows a startling rate of suicide, what some call a hidden epidemic,
Chief Investigative Reporter Armen Keteyian reports exclusively.
“I just felt like this silent scream inside of me,” said Jessica
Harrell, the sister of a soldier who took his own life.
"I opened up the door and there he was," recalled Mike Bowman, the
father of an Army reservist.
"I saw the hose double looped around his neck,” said Kevin Lucey,
another military father.
"He was gone,” said Mia Sagahon, whose soldier boyfriend committed
suicide.
Keteyian spoke with the families of five former soldiers who each
served in Iraq - only to die battling an enemy they could not conquer.
Their loved ones are now speaking out in their names.
They survived the hell that's Iraq and then they come home only to lose
their life.
Twenty-three-year-old Marine Reservist Jeff Lucey hanged himself with a
garden hose in the cellar of this parents’ home - where his father,
Kevin, found him.
"There's a crisis going on and people are just turning the other way,”
Kevin Lucey said.
Kim and Mike Bowman’s son Tim was an Army reservist who patrolled one of
the most dangerous places in Baghdad, known as Airport Road.
"His eyes when he came back were just dead. The light wasn't there
anymore," Kim Bowman said.
Eight months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Tim shot himself. He was 23.
Diana Henderson’s son, Derek, served three tours of duty in Iraq. He
died jumping off a bridge at 27.
"Going to that morgue and seeing my baby ... my life will never be the
same," she said.
Beyond the individual loss, it turns out little information exists about
how widespread suicides are among these who have served in the military.
There have been some studies, but no one has ever counted the numbers
nationwide.
"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total," Bowman
said.
Why do the families think that is?
"Because they don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be
known," Lucey said.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a member of the
Veterans Affairs Committee.
"If you're just looking at the overall number of veterans themselves
who've committed suicide, we have not been able to get the numbers,”
Murray said.
CBS News’
investigative unit wanted the numbers, so it submitted a Freedom of
Information Act request to the Department of Defense asking for the
numbers of suicides among all service members for the past 12 years.
Four months later, they sent CBS News a document, showing that
between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last
year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers.
CBS News went to the
Department of Veterans Affairs,
where Dr. Ira Katz is head of mental health.
"There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major
problem," he said.
Why hasn't the VA done a national study seeking national data on how
many veterans have committed suicide in this country?
"That research is ongoing,” he said.
So CBS News
did an investigation -
asking all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for
veterans and non-veterans, dating back to 1995. Forty-five states sent
what turned out to be a mountain of information.
And what it revealed was stunning.
In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256
suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and
every week, in just one year.
Dr. Steve Rathbun is the acting head of the Epidemiology and
Biostatistics Department at the
University of Georgia.
CBS News asked him to run a detailed analysis of the raw numbers
that we obtained from state authorities for 2004 and 2005.
It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide
in 2005 than non-vets. (Veterans committed suicide at the rate of
between 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did
so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.)
One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have
served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among
all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians
the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000,
while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per
100,000.)
"Wow! Those are devastating," said
Paul Sullivan, a former VA
analyst who is now an advocate for veterans rights from the group
Veterans For Common Sense.
"Those numbers clearly show an
epidemic of mental health problems," he said.
“We are determined to decrease veteran suicides," Dr. Katz said.
“One hundred and twenty a week. Is that a problem?” Keteyian
asked.
“You bet it’s a problem,” he said.
Is it an epidemic?
“Suicide in America is an epidemic, and that includes veterans,” Katz
said.
Sen. Murray said the numbers CBS News uncovered are significant:
“These statistics tell me we've really failed people that served our
country."
Do these numbers serve as a wake-up call for this country?
“If these numbers don't wake up this country, nothing will,” she said.
“We each have a responsibility to the men and women who serve us aren't
lost when they come home."
An update: The chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, Sen.
Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, responded to the CBS News story Tuesday.
“The report that the rate of suicide among veterans is double that of
the general population is deeply troubling and simply unacceptable. I am
especially concerned that so many young veterans appear to be taking
their own lives. For too many veterans, returning home from battle does
not bring an end to conflict. There is no question that action is
needed."
______________________________________________
120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week on Average
By Penny Coleman
AlterNet
26 November 2007
The military refuses to come clean, insisting the high rates are due to
"personal problems," not experience in combat.
Earlier this year,
using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of
mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states
requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12
years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered
information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had
served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -
and remember, this is just in 45 states - there were at least 6,256
veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every
day.
As the widow of a
Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a
book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost
husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of
the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this
long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are
so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that
there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it
will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an
administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion
wafers.
Since these new
wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, 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. They have
done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a
category they call "accidental noncombat 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."
Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.
They have managed
this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide
makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most
secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in
different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the
belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an
act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never,
however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the
rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the
act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300
years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin.
In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's
too late to say you're sorry.
The contradiction
between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind
of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and
belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and
yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental
illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible,
associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a
kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.
For years now, this
administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous
posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the
unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people,
they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the
familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-:
"Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the
streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that
took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and
Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of
Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.
Bush has also
expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair,
neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers
suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11
terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families
and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be
far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and
veterans who are taking their own lives.
Consider the 25
percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back
from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an
entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and
flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society
and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be
reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier.
This may never stop!
Neglect? The VA's
current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in
many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are
available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any
healthcare at all. Most of them are working people - too poor to afford
private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or
means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help
isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only
just now beginning.
Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.
There is a
particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers
and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible
exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in
the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up
with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so
many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb
their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.
There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
I say "about"
because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very
difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have
been blown to pieces.