The current members calculate to a suicide rate of 20.2 per every 100,000 soldiers
In 2006, the suicide rate among male veterans aged 18-29 was 46 per every 1000,000 — more than double the current active duty suicide rate
Yearly increases in the suicide rate have been recorded since 2004
Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Veterans Affairs, which tracks suicides of veterans as well as active duty troops, has estimated that as many as 18 veterans a day take their own lives.
To combat this life-or-death situation, the Army is conducting a stand-down for one month beginning February 15th in which all soldiers will be taught how to recognize suicidal behavior and intervene at a one-to-one level if they think someone they know is suicidal.
The Suicide Prevention Action Network (SPAN) USA offers two downloadable action cards that list warning signs and risk factors for suicide. They have also just released a brochure especially for military families. I offer links to those documents here:
Download PDF: Suicide Prevention for Military Families: What You Need to Know about Warning Signs and Getting Help
I have mentioned many times here in this blog that I lost a dear friend and ex-Special Forces warrior to suicide which I believe was a result of his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I don’t know if Robin would have sought help if it had been available, but I know he looked everywhere for help when he was alive, and if his beloved corps had offered it to him he would have taken it without question. Help has to come from the warriors. They have to take care of their own. Or more and more, and more and more, and more and more, will end up like my friend Robin did: with their brains blown out on the wall behind them.
Broken Bridge by Yali Shi of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, courtesy stock.Xchng
Yesterday I went to my doctor to hear him confirm what I already knew: I have bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome — damage in both wrists. To begin aggressive therapy, he injected me with a steroid and gave me splints for both wrists, so now I feel like RoboCop, wearing big, stiff, black gauntlets on my arms, walking like the Frankenstein monster. I have to resist the urge to raise my arms to my chin and growl when I walk down the hall.
I kid, only to hide my depression about the knowledge that if this treatment doesn’t work, I’ll have to undergo yet another surgery for yet another condition. My health continues to just be bad, and now, the thing I love — writing — is in jeopardy. I know I can’t give in to depression and despair, but now I know what it feels like to be disabled. The separateness you feel, having a physical difference that people can’t avoid when they look at you. I’ve already, in the space of a day, been granted piteous and knowing looks from people.
Other people can’t break me, and I won’t let myself break me, and even though it hurts to type these words right now, I won’t let my own wrists break me. But I am feeling broken.
sale2 by Roland Maier of Wolfrathausen, Germany courtesy stockXchng
We are exactly three weeks away from owning a house today, a fact that fills me with an inner joy so great that not even waking up with the Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revere” in my head (proof of the utter randomness factor of the human brain) can dim it. I would be remiss, however, if I did not admit that this same fact also fills me with a lot of anxiety, of the “can we really afford this?” variety, and that particular anxiety is tied to a very deep childhood fear of things falling apart.
Poverty was a very real threat for us growing up. When I was born my parents lived in my father’s parents’ home, and though they quickly found an apartment for us to live in by the time my sister Dianna was born, seventeen months after me, my father lost his job at the Postal Service and we ended up on welfare and in the projects in Staten Island by the time my little sister was born, right after I turned four years old. I believe it was this combination of stressors — losing his job while trying to provide for a suddenly large family along with the temptation of a younger woman coming back into his life whom he had been denied access to in his teenage years, having to go onto a welfare training program that secretly humiliated him, feeling that he had left the Marines like a coward when many of his friends were in Viet Nam dying — that resulted in my abuse and the abuse suffered by my sisters. After my mother left my father, we were on welfare assistance and lived in a trailer for several years until she re-married, and money was always out of reach, always worried about.
In fact, I’ve never lived in a home that belonged to me before. I’ve always lived in apartments and rental houses, or by another’s leave, and this will be the first house that is truly mine.
Tied deeply in the money worry that is always there for me is the fear of being betrayed. My earliest horror was being ripped from my home in the middle of the night, and it was my earliest remembered traumatic experience, a night I had nightmares about for years afterward because there was no warning. Later my stepfather habitually moved us year after year to different locations — I later found out, because my mother was afraid of my father finding out where we were — without warning us. Every year, it seemed, I would make friends and make commitments at my school for the next year — become the President of the FHA, one year; join the flag corps; commit to a Beta Club committee over the summer — but then have to quit all of those things because we were suddenly moving to the other side of the county, for no reason that I could see. I’d be continually uprooted, without warning. One day my mother would just come home and say, “Pack, we’re moving tomorrow.” And a truck would come the next day and we’d just be gone, like we had never lived there.
I was also often being told we suddenly could not afford something I’d been promised. I’d usually have to wait to buy something I needed anyway, because we could never afford anything, but often I’d find out we couldn’t afford it after all, usually after my stepfather bought a new car or went on a vacation to see his grandchildren, who didn’t know he was remarried to a woman with three children. When I got old enough to understand something about money, checking accounts, savings and credit, and started asking those questions, I was risking being hit in the mouth.
So who knew? I certainly did not know if we could afford anything, or how long we’d be staying, and I certainly never felt like anything I needed, let alone anything I desired, counted.
My worries, then, about money — about running out, as well as being lied to about it — are deep in my marrow and not easily extracted by my husband telling me to have faith, or that we can afford something at the end of the month, or the quarter, or whatever. And just because the mortgage company says we’re getting something at closing doesn’t make it so, according to the fear monster, the snake, coiled around my small intestine telling me that I’m never going to get that house because I never do get anything good. So I find myself needling my husband sometimes with my worry, and we occasionally get into snipes. Not fights. Richard and I never really fight, but we do get upset with one another occasionally, and usually it’s because I’m being stupid about money. We had a little snipe last night, and I try to apologize when I calm down, because I know where the nagging and needling comes from. It comes from my anxiety cycle. It comes from worrying that everything is going to fall apart. You’d think that knowing there is an actual house with an actual foundation, an actual roof, actual cabinets and flooring installed, and now an actual sidewalk poured in front of it would lessen that anxiety and make me less likely to get on that train again. But that cycle is not going to switch off even after the papers are signed.
All I can do is keep showing myself that the life I live now is true and I am not going to be betrayed anymore by anyone, and that Richard and I got here with our own two hands. Anxiety snake be damned. But he sings like a broken record. Just like a song stuck in your head that you wake up with, and don’t understand why.
Recently I discussed the recurring nightmare memory that led me to a realization of what my “problem” is: Complex PTSD as a result of childhood sexual trauma and abuse, with what I believe was delayed onset prompted by a series of horrific car accidents. My realization did not come in one big shaking “Eureka!” moment; it came rather in a series of “aha!” incidents that gradually piled up into a crushing mass, and one day I opened the door to that mass to let it in, and attempted suicide.
Suicide was not the solution, but it was through my suicide attempt that I received a diagnosis. I think if there was ever any “Eureka!” moment in my life it was my diagnosis, because hearing it was the day that crushing mass fell from my shoulders in a heap, and I realized that, once and for all, I was no longer carrying the burden of … everything. Of not knowing what the hell was wrong with me. Of not knowing if what had happened to me was real. Suddenly I knew; I had recognition. I could look at my diagnosis and I could see myself, and I could say, yes, that is me, that is what I am. Finally, there were no more missing puzzle pieces. I was whole. I was not perfect, I was not an elegant picture of the perfect 21st century modern put-together woman, but I was me. Everything clicked into place.
One of those first realizations — and I can’t say it was the first, because I don’t really remember now which was the first, if there was one — was after I found my father again, at the age of 31. After not even lifting a single finger to find my father, it only took me a few minutes on the internet to locate my father’s address in Staten Island, New York, and a few more minutes to type up a letter, address it and put it in the mail. I soon received an e-mail from my father’s brother’s wife that my father had received my letter, was extraordinarily happy to hear from me and would be writing soon. We immediately began a lengthy correspondence, and after a few weeks of writing I finally called my father and talked to him on the phone.
Hearing his voice on the phone was a strange experience — like coming home and opening up a maw into my unknown fears at the same time. I would be very happy while talking to my Dad, but afterwards I would feel very numb, and then I would sink into strange depressions that lasted several days. After a couple of short phone calls, I had a full day off of work, a rarity at that time when I was managing a retail drug store without an assistant and commonly had to both open and close the store, every day.
This particular day I called my father about ten in the morning and ended up talking to him for over twelve hours about every little thing you can imagine — my cats, my time in college, all my friends, and on and on and on. On that call we approached the subject of abuse, and my father steadfastly denied every hitting me, putting me in a closet or doing anything else to harm me. He insisted that all of the things my mother told me had happened were patently untrue.
I remember bawling like a little child, unable to form any coherent words, because in that moment I knew that my father was right. And also wrong, because I knew he was lying about the abuse, too.
I couldn’t explain how I knew, and I still can’t. I knew that my mother had most definitely exaggerated the scope and length of time that my father’s abuse of me had occurred — and please understand, my mother never admitted that my father had sexually molested me, but only that he had locked me in closets, beat me with his belt, neglected me by locking me up and leaving my sisters in the apartment for hours without food or water, failed to change my sister’s diapers, broke furniture and plates in horrible rages — but I also knew that my father had definitely touched me in a way that was inappropriate, because the day before our phone call, my father had sent me another long letter telling me the story of his life, and in it he had enclosed a picture that he said reminded him of me, that he wanted to share with me.
The picture was of a Penthouse centerfold, fingers spreading her labia apart.
You could say that incestual moment was a revelation, too. Eureka.
Dr. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who has worked with the VA clinic in Boston, spoke at the American Psychoanalytic Association Meeting today and stated his belief that removing the word “disorder” from the name of the condition, “post-traumatic stress disorder,” or PTSD, would help remove the stigma that prevents many wounded veterans from seeking treatment for their pain. His argument was pretty striking to me.
“I want to get everyone thinking like a trauma surgeon rather than an internist,” he said.
For example, if a soldier loses an arm in a roadside bombing incident, “he wouldn’t be diagnosed with ‘MAD,’ or missing arm disorder,” Dr. Shay said.
In treating such a soldier, the first step would be to control hemorrhage, then look to prevent infection — a complication that manifests much more slowly, much as the lasting effects of PTSD, Dr. Shay said.
Chicago psychiatrist Prudence Gourguechon, M.D., president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, affirmed Dr. Shay’s suggestion.
“It is a psychological injury of war,” she said. “It’s not that there is something [innately] wrong with you.”
Although my injury, complex PTSD, is different from the PTSD that veterans suffer, I believe strongly that such a sea change in the way PTSD is treated could really help wounded warriors and their families recover at least partly, if not completely, from PTSD. For more on Dr. Shay’s contention, see the MedPage article that is the subject of the video report below.
Tomb of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King
Today is the day we remember that we are more than we have been.
I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life’s blueprint?
… . I want to suggest some of the things that should be in your life’s blueprint. Number one, in your life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth, and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.
Secondly, in your life’s blueprint, you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor… .
And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in in the valley. But be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you will win or fall. Be the best of whatever you are.
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadephia, PA, October 26, 1967.
I have been really down all week since I discovered that I blew my chance with school. Long story short, I did not end up graduating last May because I had an outstanding incomplete that I was unable to finish. I was a bit perturbed about this particular class because it was not a graduation requirement but an extra elective, and I did not need the credits to graduate as I had taken all of the required credits — core classes and track electives — and the class was one I had picked up out of curiosity. However, because I listed this class in my Plan of Work for graduation, the dean required me to finish it with a B in order to receive my diploma.
After trying all bloody summer to figure out what to do about this situation, I ended up taking a leave of absence for the fall semester after it was determined I had no choice but to take the class, even though it wasn’t offered in the fall. The problem now is that the class is not offered in the spring, either, and this is the last semester I can take a class and still get my M.S. from the Tech Comm program at NC State. I enrolled in 2004 and you have to complete your credits within six years. I’ve got to decide now if I want to try to re-enroll or go somewhere else.
It was agreed that I would take an independent study this semester, but I had to apply for re-admission to the university after the leave of absence the university forced me to take. The letter I received from the dean, which was a copy of a letter addressed to my advisor and not written to me (I was referred to in the letter as “the student” and “she;” I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t refer to me by my fucking student ID number) told me to apply for re-admission after classes started because I could not get a PIN (necessary for online enrollment) until after classes started. When I returned to the Registration and Records site after classes started I was informed that I could not apply for re-admission because the re-admission period was closed and that I should have applied thirty days prior to the start of class.
There is no fighting this bureaucratic bullshit, and after four days of crying about this goddamned degree that I have gotten into thousands of dollars in debt over, struggled with every year because I did not see how it was helping my career, and getting a job in the field in which I studied because of my experience in the field, not because of my class work, I have realized that I have spent four years basically jerking off the North Carolina educational system (at great fucking expense to me) and that, professionally, which is why I joined the program, it got me absolutely nowhere.
While I feel that I am enriched by the time I spent in class and the ideas to which I was exposed, I have to admit that my career is still in marketing and that’s where I want to stay, and still today I know that an MBA would get me nowhere and is still not worth pursuing. So five years later, I got the salary I wanted five years ago—by busting my ass at my jobs and working my way here.
Thanks for nothing, NC State. I don’t know what to do with the credits now; I’m considering finding something to transfer them into, but all I want to do — all I’ve ever wanted to do — is write. I want to rewrite the screenplay and/or book that I had in me the day I first put an application together for NC State for the MFA program, and was rejected, and transferred my application to the MS in Tech Comm program instead.
I’m not really back where I’m started. I’m just still here. I really want to feel good that I got here on my own. But I owe a lot of money for nothing, my book still isn’t written, and I’m a hell of a lot older than I was five years ago, to come to the realization that I’ve just been running in place. It’s hard not to feel beat absolutely down.
TornPaper4 by Billy Alexander of Charlotte, NC courtesy stock.Xchng
As early as I can remember I have had one recurring nightmare and one memory that did not fit.
That might not sound like much at first glance, but I had this nightmare over and over and over. The nightmare made me so afraid to fall asleep some nights that I would invent elaborate games with myself to stay awake: pressing my fingers into my eyelids until I saw funky light patterns that I could watch for hours; sneaking a flashlight under my cover and reading a book all night long; sucking my thumb; memorizing poems and telling them to myself over and over; writing in my diary; telling myself the plots of plays and movies; singing songs to myself; holding my breath, then hyperventilating; counting. Anything, not to fall asleep and dream that I was trapped in a dark place without a way out, without a window, without a door, sealed in to the dark and the heat with no way out. I would wake from this nightmare plastered to the wall with my hands clawing for a door, a seam, some way to get out.
Over and over and over.
The memory that did not fit did not scare me in the same way, but I puzzled over it, picking at it like a knot in my hair or a stray piece of lettuce stuck in my teeth, worrying over it. What was weird about it was that it was like a movie scene. In my head, the memory, if it was that, seemed to be something that must have happened to someone else, because I did not remember the room, I did not remember the man, or at least what I could see of him, and the girl in the memory could not be me. Because I was a girl, and a virgin, and I have never seen a grown man’s penis. Had I?
When I spoke to my mother about either of these experiences, she said they were bad dreams. They didn’t happen, so I should just dismiss them; they had no power because they weren’t true.
After my mother packed us all up and ran away from my father, she destroyed every picture of him, including every picture of us in which he appeared, as if they didn’t happen.
Well, I had a father, and experiences with my father; my nightmare was a memory, and both of my memories were true. When I finally pieced the truth together and recovered my memories, my mother refused to discuss them. The past was done, she said.
This did not happen, was essentially what she had said, so long ago. But what she did, by severing my connections to what happened to me, was sever me from the truth, leaving me wounded forever.
And for much of my life, I was not all there. I remember when Elizabeth Smart was found, her parents said that they planned not to discuss the trauma, and I thought this was the most horrible thing I had ever heard. She seems to have moved on well, although she also insists she doesn’t discuss it much, but she seems to be one of those who can move on. Good for her. If I had one thing to say to a parent of a child who has experienced trauma, I would say this: acknowledge what happened and look it in the eye. Otherwise you doom yourself to our fate. I’m here now, and my mother has been severed from my life. Because I can no longer hold court with lies. And now there are no pictures of my mother in my house.
Crucifixion with Mary and St John the Evangelist, Antonio Da Firenze, c 1400.
I have been driven into contemplation of the far past recently. Driving down I-85 South to Atlanta on our way to the PapaJohns.com Bowl, we passed Belmont Abbey College and on through Gastonia and Bessemer City, a trip that always brings me to a melancholy recall of my last days there at the Abbey and the very, very hard time I had during the year 1987. It was the first year when suicidal ideation was my constant companion, and now that I know so much more about myself, I can recognize that as the first year I really was experiencing a major depressive episode, beyond the help of my friends.
My mother refused to help me until she literally had no choice but to take me in or face the fact that her daughter was living on the streets, and so I ended up, at last, going back to Asheville. I straightened things out, at least financially, and I began to slowly feel happier, but I would not say I got out of depression then. I think I became more of a functioning depressive in the ten years that followed, doomed, or at least feeling doomed, to follow a destructive pattern.
My life has changed so much now that those years sometimes seem to belong to another person’s life, but they are mine and I have to own them even though I have rejected them. They are the deep, dark ochres in the tapestry of my life.
Similarly, in recent weeks I have been reunited through the modern-day miracle of Facebook with some very, very old friends from even before that time, and have gotten in touch with my oldest, and very best, friend. Getting back in touch with her has also woken up a lot of memories, not all of them kind of course, but most of them sweet in the bitter way of your adolescence, when there are things you wish you could claim happened to someone else, or that were done by someone else, but nope—you were the dope that did them all.
I have also been speaking about all this past with my shrink, cataloguing my growth history I suppose. That is who I was, I say, and marvel, and weep bitterly, for that is who I am still. It’s all me. What a mess. But when I take stock and assign blame, so much blame, for the misery I caused other people and myself, on myself and on my failure to look for the light, there is still some blame that must be assigned, and I keep coming back to her. To my mother. To the one who will not accept it, will not take it, who has so far refused to bear any responsibility for me that she has severed me from her life rather than bear the shame, the pain, the agony of her own burden.
So I bear mine knowing she will not bear hers. Knowing what belongs to me, I have to admit that some of it belongs to her. It doesn’t matter any more what the truth is. Truth is a construct when it comes to the murky paths of memory. But accounting for it—saying you are sorry for it—is what you owe to the future. I know that I will have no future without owning and embracing my past.
My mother, whose past is littered with the non-actions taken to not-save her own children, rejects the past, over and over. And will never have a future. When I catalog this misery I know I can put it away because I have a different now. My mother’s past is never over, and so her misery never ends. But there is nothing I can do for her now.
A study led by Pia Heppner, Ph.D., psychologist with the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs of San Diego, VA Center of Excellence for Stress and Mental Health (CESAMH), has found that veterans with PTSD are more likely to also meet the criteria for metabolic syndrome, a currently controversial diagnosis that includes elevated BP, higher waist-to-hip ratios and high fasting concentrations of HDLs, glucose and triglycerides. Metabolic syndrome is associated with obesity, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, otherwise known as the diseases fat people get.
“Our research indicates that stress and post-stress responses are related to long-term health outcomes,” said Heppner. Studies show that veterans, prisoners of war and individuals exposed to severe trauma have higher rates of disease and increased use of health care, she continued. “Our findings suggest that metabolic syndrome provides a useful framework for assessing and describing the physical burden of PTSD and can be used prospectively to evaluate health risk that may be associated with combat exposure and PTSD.”
If they can’t kill you one way, they’ll try another. Sometimes it seems there is no respite anywhere.
Hope by Ahmed Al-Shukaili of Muscat, Oman courtesy stock.Xchng
