Military suicide prevention efforts fail: report

[unhappycamper]

Military suicide prevention efforts fail: report
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON | Thu Sep 23, 2010 5:25pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Efforts to prevent suicides among U.S. war veterans are failing, in part because distressed troops do not trust the military to help them, top military officials said on Thursday.

Poor training, a lack of coordination and an overstretched military are also factors, but a new 76-point plan lays out ways to improve this, Colonel John Bradley, chief of psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, told a conference.

Bradley said a team of experts spent a year interviewing troops who had attempted suicide, family members and others for the report and plan, presented last month to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is due to report to Congress in 90 days.

"They tell us again and again that we are failing," Bradley told a symposium on military medicine sponsored by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.

Each branch of the services -- the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines -- rushed to create a suicide prevention program, but there was no coordination. The report recommends that the defense secretary's office take over coordination of suicide prevention efforts.

[Iterate]

1. Efforts are failing and they will continue to fail.

Coordinating efforts, 76-point plans, on-the-ground prevention training, all of it will fail because the pattern of thought and behavior that makes the military what is cannot be changed in time to help more than a few people. At its core, the military relies on an understanding of the world in terms of roles, rules, and hierarchy, an understanding that is useless in treating trauma.

"They don't trust us," said Colonel Bradley.
"We have done all the right things but despite all the things we have done, suicide rates have risen," said Colonel Hoge.

Though there may be a few soldiers, veterans, and doctors at Walter Reed who "get it", they will be as outnumbered and frustrated as a DUer at a values voter conference.

So for the first time in my life I would advocate outsourcing a governmental responsibility, the entire project. Really.

But they certainly haven't asked me (and probably shouldn't), or anyone I know of who has spent a lifetime studying the issue. They want to keep it to themselves, in-house, just like the young Marines want to keep their pain, to themselves, to sort it out themselves...