Army Suicides, “Things are getting better.” Huh?

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

This was caught a short while ago:

Number of Army Suicides Expected to Top Last Year’s Number

The U.S. Army says it expects the number of suicides among active duty soldiers to top last year’s numbers, although it says progress is being made in addressing the issue…>>>>

They just made a quick comment at the end of the PBS News Hour, saying “The pace was slowing.” the Army’s response to the higher numbers of suicides!

Army thinking seems to not have changed after the previous CiC leadership and all that entailed as to failed leadership, extremely failed policies and total incompetence. More suicides is making progress, Right!

Which leads into this found at Veterans Today

Bush VA Appointees:’Believe in God, You Won’t Have PTSD’

God, the Army, and PTSD

Is religion an obstacle to treatment?

by Tara McKelvey

When Roger Benimoff arrived at the psychiatric building of the Coatesville, Pennsylvania veterans’ hospital, he was greeted by a message carved into a nearby tree stump: “Welcome Home.” It was a reminder that things had not turned out as he had expected.

In Faith Under Fire: An Army Chaplain’s Memoir, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered where God was in all of this, and was not alone in that bewilderment and pain.

Snip

During the Iraq war, however, the great difficulty veterans experienced in getting psychiatric care-greater than before-was not a product of cost-cutting, but of conviction: many Bush administration officials believed that soldiers who supported the war would not face psychological problems, and if they did, they would find comfort in faith. In a resigned tone, one prominent researcher who worked for the VA, and asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, explained that high-ranking officials believed that “Jesus fixes everything.” Benimoff and the others who returned with devastating psychological injuries found a faith-based bureau within the VA. At veterans’ hospitals, chaplains were conducting spirituality assessments of patients.

Snip

Things had already begun to change dramatically at the VA by early 2005, shortly after Roger Benimoff left for his second deployment to Iraq. Many appointees at the agency were disturbed that so many Iraq veterans showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In part the concern grew from skepticism about the diagnosis itself, which some believed to be a legacy of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement….>>>>>

That ones a long read but worth it.

How wide spread was this? And if well embedded at the time in the VA Health Care System was it done at Walter Reed, a Military Care Facility as well? Now this might be an issue to keep in mind as to the extremely tragic killings of the soldiers at Ft Hood by a soldier who was a Major and a mental health care psychiatrist in the military at Walter Reed and then Fort Hood but wasn’t of the christian faith!