Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans

[Nitro Express]

Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans
NEW YORK, Nov. 13, 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.

[Ellyllions]

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=26220

Military veterans twice as likely to commit suicide
Medical Studies/Trials
Published: Tuesday, 12-Jun-2007


Researchers say former military personnel are twice as likely to commit suicide than people who have not seen combat.
After tracking men who had served in the armed forces over a 12 year period researchers in the United States have found they are twice as likely to die from suicide compared with men in the general population.

Lead researcher Mark Kaplan of Portland State University in Oregon says doctors need to be aware of this and check for signs of suicidal intentions in soldiers returning from service in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The study tracked 320,890 U.S. men over 18 years for 12 years, about a third of whom served in the U.S. military between 1917 and 1994; the others had no military background.

Of the veterans studied, about 29 percent served in the Vietnam War, 28 percent in World War Two, 16 percent in the Korean War and the rest in other conflicts up through the 1991 Gulf War.

The researchers found that those with military service committed suicide at a rate 2.13 times higher than the other men, but did not have a higher risk of dying from disease, accidental causes or murder.

The researchers say the risk was highest in veterans who could not participate fully in home, work or leisure activities because of a health problem.

It was also found that the veterans who killed themselves were also more likely to be older, white, better educated and less likely to have never been married than other suicides.

The study also found that overweight veterans were less likely to have committed suicide than veterans of normal weight and veterans were 58% more likely to use a gun to kill themselves than other suicides.

The authors advise doctors to be on alert signs of suicide among veterans, as well as their access to firearms.

Kaplan says studies show that veterans are more likely to own guns than the rest of the population and regardless of when an individual served in the military, they are at an elevated risk for suicide.

Kaplan says they did not look at suicide among women veterans because there were so few suicide deaths among the group in the data they analyzed.

They suggest U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are particularly vulnerable and doctors should be alert for signs of depression and suicidal tendencies.

The research was funded with a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health and is published in the July issue of Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

[Ellyllions]

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/06/ap_vetsuicide_070614/

Study: Vets twice as likely to commit suicide

The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Jun 14, 2007 6:41:02 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. — American veterans commit suicide at twice the rate of civilians, a study by Portland researchers said.

The study’s authors and others involved in veterans’ affairs say the findings of the study are a wake-up call for both government and civilian health care providers dealing with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

They note that veterans who have been physically impaired are at greatest risk, a significant finding given advances in military medicine that enable troops to survive wounds that would have killed them in an earlier time.

“This does foreshadow some ominous trends,” said Mark S. Kaplan, a professor of community health at Portland State University and the study’s lead author.

The study’s findings include veterans of conflicts from World War I to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They appear in the July issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The study broadened its reach beyond veterans who receive care through the Department of Veterans Affairs system to those treated in civilian hospitals and clinics, the authors said.

The study surveyed 104,026 veterans, of whom 197 committed suicide, and 216,864 civilians, of whom 311 committed suicide. The researchers adjusted for a lengthy list of social and economic factors to reach the conclusion that the suicide rate among veterans was twice as great as that among civilians.

The findings described other factors affecting suicide among veterans:

• Whites and men with more than 12 years of education were at greater risk.

• Veterans are 58 percent more likely to shoot themselves than nonveterans.

• Veterans and nonveterans had the same risk of death from other causes such as disease and accidents.

• Veterans who committed suicide were more likely to live in rural areas.

• Overweight veterans had a lower risk for suicide than veterans of normal weight.

Kaplan plans a follow-up to measure how the intensity of combat affects mental health.

“There are different kinds of combat experience,” he told The Oregonian newspaper. Service in Iraq might be especially hard, he said, with the ever-present stress of anticipating roadside bombs and ambushes.

Even in Baghdad’s Green Zone, military desk workers live with fear of an incoming mortar round, he said.

Another study author, Dr. Bentson McFarland, a professor of psychiatry, public health and preventive medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, said he believes that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan “are at very high risk.”

“They find themselves under fire at all times, no safe zones — that’s extremely stressful,” he said. “Then there’s the time commitment — it seems like an endless war. At least in World War II, they could see on a month-by-month basis that they were making some headway.”

Michael O’Rourke, assistant director of veterans health policy for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said that of the 686,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have been separated from the service, more than 39,000 have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder — a risk factor for suicide — at Veterans Affairs facilities.

O’Rourke said there is a potential for far more to be diagnosed, and he worries what will happen when some 700,000 additional veterans muster out of the service.

The Veterans Affairs system acknowledged in a May report shortcomings in its mental health programs and is bracing for a rise in mental health care needs.

[Ellyllions]

It's no secret that Veterans commit suicide.

Generally people who have been engaged in careers of great stress and carnage have a greater tendency to take their own lives at an alarming rate.

We aren't conditioned to deal with death on a mass scale as a society as we don't actually see it as much.

Police Officers have been #1 in the list for years because they deal with it every single day. They're also at the top spot for divorce as well.

It's horrible work that our civil servants do, but aren't we damn glad that someone is willing to do it?

[FORD]

It's a fucking tragedy in either case, whether a veteran, police officer, or whatever line of work, to be at the point where it's so dark that you can't see any other way out, except to end the pain by whatever means available. :(

[Nitro Express]

My uncle was a special agent of the FBI in the Hoover years and saw horrible shit. The thing is, the organization he was in didn't fuck him over. J. Edgar Hoover was a lot of things and corrupt but he treated his agents decently.

Too many police officers work in shitty systems and the military has been stabbing the soldiers in the back.

People can take a lot of shit if they know the system supports them and the cause is a good one.

I think many of these people just feel fucked over by everybody and what is the point of living?