Easy Stunts on Raising Suicide Awareness Predictable Outcome

Awareness of Predictable Heartbreaking Outcome
Combat PTSD Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
May 10, 2017

All across the country people have been publicly punishing themselves and talking about veterans committing suicide. Yep, that is what it boils down to. They are making themselves feel better by loading up backpacks and taking a hike, walking miles, doing pushups and asking for our money. They may feel as if they just accomplished something but the truth is, they'd run out of things to talk about if they were actually doing the work to change the outcome and save lives.

How can they save anyone by taking a walk? Veterans with PTSD have plenty of experience with people walking away from them.

How can they save anyone by doing pushups? Veterans are used to people pushing them out of their lives.

How can strapping on a heavy backpack do them any good when the weight of their service is crushing their souls?

The answer to saving lives is none of the above. But why do the work when that has to be done in private, side-by-side with them and freely given. A lot harder than doing a publicity stunt.

Suicides within the military was also a predicable outcome back in 2009. I predicted it back then after decades of research, working with veterans and paying attention as if all of this mattered. The rise in OEF and OIF veterans committing suicide was also predictable considering they had this training that was supposed to prevent them from becoming "mentally weak" which added insult to their injury. When they were told they could train their brains to be mentally tough, that is the message they believed and to them, it meant they were weak or didn't train right.

When the DOD pointed out that a lot of the suicides happened when the servicemembers had not even deployed, that should have sounded alarm bells all over the country. If that training wasn't even good enough to prevent non-deployed from taking their own lives, how did they expect it to do any good for those with multiple deployments?

When the number of suicides within the military went up, after they started this "effort" and spent billions over the last decade on it, why did they continue to use it? 

This was also supposed to include military families on training them to be "resilient" as well. Had any of this worked, we wouldn't have to be reading something like the following report.

Study explores military-family functioning before and after suicide deaths

Kristie Auman-Bauer

May 8, 2017

"Spouses of Marines who died by suicide reported significantly lower family cohesiveness and were five times more likely to report family conflict in the year prior to the death compared to spouses of Marines who died in combat. Spouses of those who died by suicide also reported having poorer psychological health in the year prior to the suicide. There were no differences in spouse attitudes toward the military either before or after Marine deaths, and attitudes remained relatively positive."

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For the first time in modern history, the suicide rate of active-duty service members exceeds that of the civilian population. This finding is even more alarming considering that the suicide rate for U.S. civilians hit a 30-year high in 2014, rising a staggering 24 percent in the preceding 15 years.

Neither the factors that contribute to service-member suicides, nor the impact of suicides on military families are well understood. “It has been assumed for a long time that the increase in military suicides was due to the high operational tempo of the Global War on Terror,” stated Keith Aronson, associate director of the Clearinghouse for Military Family Readiness at Penn State and senior research associate in the department of biobehavioral health. “However, there are conflicting findings in the research with some studies finding the highest suicide rates are actually among those service members who never deployed.” read more here