With all the talk about suicide bombers, there's been hardly any news about the
shocking rise in suicides amongst US troops in battle and at home. For the past few days
I have been following this story as reported by Mehul Srivastava and Jim DeBrosse from
The Dayton Daily News. Apparently, the stress rate is so high amongst troops that depression is on the rise. Not only are there too few mental health specialists on the ground, but many soldiers are actually being discouraged from seeking help. Troops returning home from Iraq are also becoming more prone to suicide. Here's a clip from the story that ran to day in
The Dayton Daily News:
Too few mental health specialists
After eight years of relatively low rates of suicide among Army personnel -- 11.9 per 100,000 troops -- suicides spiked last year not long after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. From March to October, 17 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Kuwait committed suicide - including five deaths in the month of July alone.
The problem may have begun even before U.S. troops set foot in Iraq. As soldiers leave for combat, the Armed Forces are required by law to make accurate records of their health, both mental and physical. By passing the law in 1998, Congress had hoped to avoid a recurrence of the first Gulf War, when veterans complaining about a variety of health symptoms dubbed Gulf War Syndrome. Health officials found that there was no way to tell if their problems had started before or after the war.
Dr. Manning Feinleib, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, told Congress last year that the two-page screening questionnaire handed out to soldiers contained "little worthwhile data." In September of last year, the GAO found that 40 percent of Army soldiers were missing one page of their questionnaire from their files, and 98 percent of Air Force personnel were missing either one or both pages.
In July 2003, when soldier suicides in Iraq reached their peak, the Army took the unprecedented step of sending a team of consultants to the war zone to assess the problem and make recommendations to commanders in the field.
The Army's Mental Health Advisory Team issued its report Dec. 16, but it wasn't released to the public until the following March. The majority of the 756 soldiers interviewed reported low or very low morale. Of the soldiers who screened positive for depression, anxiety or traumatic stress, fewer than one in three said they had received any help from an Army professional, including doctors and chaplains.
Cheyenne Forsythe of Killeen, Texas, who finished his Army enlistment in March after serving as a mental health specialist to the Army's Third Brigade in Iraq, said many soldiers couldn't get help in the field even if they had wanted it -- there were too few specialists on hand. He said being personally responsible for the mental well-being of several thousand soldiers under combat conditions "was overwhelming."
One team of four specialists was allotted to each brigade, each of which could total anywhere from 1,500 to 3,500 personnel, Forsythe said. "When you looked around, there just wasn't enough of us to go around. You think you're doing your job, and then someone commits suicide not more than 500 yards away, and it's too late."
Even if help had been readily available, almost 60 percent of soldiers felt that seeking help might make them seem weak and that their superiors would then treat them differently or deny them promotions, the Army report found. Worse, nearly half of those interviewed felt their superiors would blame them if they reported a problem.
Pogany, the staff sergeant who was charged with cowardice, says his experience proves that some Army leaders discourage soldiers from seeking psychiatric help.
(Dayton Daily News, 11 October 2004)
That's right: US troops were charged with cowardice when they sought help for their stress related mental health issues.
There are more services, apparently, for soldiers who return home than soldiers in Iraq, but the mental battle also isn't easier.
My heart aches for our troops caught in this situation.
In an effort to get this story to a wider public, I asked Srivastava why this story wasn't getting more notice in the press and what could be done about it:
"Well, for one thing, it is not an easily noticed trend. Most newspapers have rules that prevent them from writing about suicides, and so a lot of these stories remain unreported. Secondly, these suicides are happening in places quite far away from each other - Colorado, North Carolina etc.. and so even if a reporter notices one or two, he doesn't necessarily make the leap to connecting these with suicides in another state.
Our newspaper had two local suicides within a day of each other (The Fourth of July) and that's what got us started on the story. Even then, our database of the suicides took over a
month to build and verify..
"Talk about it. Send emails to each other. Keep a look-out on friends who have just returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. Most importantly, write to your
congressman. .
"Our newspaper took the bold step of devoting nearly 350 inches of the newspaper to this story (most new stories are under 20 inches), and we covered it as exhaustively as we could. We will be doing a follow-up on the story sometime soon, and all the aspects we can possibly come up will be in the newspaper.
Many thanks to The Dayton Daily News for tracking down and publishing this important story.
Let's this story into the national media so our troops can get the respect and care they need, instead of another useless speech from Rumsfeld or another impish outburst from our President.