Sunday, January 21, 2018

Want to change the outcome on suicides? Then learn first!

Too many failed by what we failed to change
Combat PTSD Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
January 21, 2018

Veterans’ suicide prevention discussed at Carson City meeting, Nevada Appeal has managed to bring up something that too many others never took the time to know,
"While the number of suicides has focused on the younger veterans, Burns said there's been an uptick in the number of veterans from the Vietnam War era who are taking their lives. Now, after many of them had jobs, raised a family and made a life for themselves, they are retired, but the memories of a war that occurred 50 years ago are bubbling up again."
but then again, too few bothered to know enough to even wonder why. As bad as it is right now, if we do nothing, do not learn from what failed it will keep getting worse. 

We have commit ourselves to doing what worked, if not, it will be the same result when the OIF and OIF generation has been replaced on the attention scale by whatever group is sent to yet another war.

Keep in mind that the OEF and OIF veterans were "trained" in prevention, yet as the number of enlisted went down by the thousands, suicides did not drop accordingly. They still average to more than one a day.

Department of Defense Suicide Report
 2012, Active Duty 321, Reserves 204
2013 Active Duty 256, Reserves 220
2014 Active Duty 276, Reserves 170
2015 Active Duty 266, Reserves 214
2016 Active Duty 280, Reserves 203
2017 Active Duty 130, Reserves 116 for the first half of the year. Total has not been released yet.

This "training" did not work and the younger veterans committing suicide at triple their peer rate, along with the numbers you just read, prove what the DOD has failed to see.
In the last report, the number was back down to 20, but too few even know what data was missing from that report.

The number of veterans holding steady since 1999 prove that what everyone else is doing, from Congress to all the "awareness" people doing a lot of talking, failed. The worst thing with the numbers the VA knows about holding steady, is that the number of veterans alive in the country has dropped since then by about 5 million.

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