Seal team: Medicate and Isolate

BahamaBob said:

Not according to the military times.

VA: Suicide rate for younger veterans increased by more than 10 percent

"According to the report, the suicide rate of veterans aged 18 to 34 steadily increased from 2006 to 2016, with a jump of more than 10 percent from 2015 to 2016. That translates into 45 deaths per 100,000 veterans, the highest of any age group."

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There is a lot of data to be mined from your own statistics...

Nationally, the suicide rate among all adults rose from 2005 to 2016 by nearly 21 percent, indicating the challenges facing prevention efforts may also be affected by non-military and non-veteran factors. Among veterans alone, the rate was up 26 percent over that span.

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Which means the actual increase was what, 4%? Much more insignificant once the national rise is factored in.

And the greatest number by far is still among those 55 and older, who are well past the age of service. And more non-combat vets kill themselves than combat vets.

Myself, I largely ignore these kinds of things, I always have. I really do not see those who have ever served as some kind of "special interest group", where every little thing they have ever done in their lived has to be held against their being a Veteran. So some dude offs himself when he is 55. How is that relevant to these statistics simply because he may have served 4 years from 1983-1987 in the military?

There is no connection. Odds are 99 out of 100 he spent at most 2 years in West Germany as a vehicle mechanic during the Cold War, the rest probably on some stateside base doing their job like anybody else. But his killing himself because he lost his job and has a meth problem 30 years later somehow makes it relevant?

And want to know something about "Military Times"? Most of us laugh at it. It was owned until very recently by the Gannet Corporation (owners of USA Today), and it is simply a part of now a much larger conglomerate that only publishes one other periodical (Sunset magazine). Nobody in the military has taken this seriously in decades. It is largely only read to find out promotion lists, who has been promoted, and who has retired or died. Their articles are mostly opinion pieces anymore, and pretty much ignored. Even the National Enquirer has more credibility among most of us than those rags do.

I am sure that if they had their way, we would eliminate all of the cadences we do and sing "Baby Shark" instead of about "Yellow Birds".

Jetboogieman said:

It seems to be quite a multifaceted issue.

In all my time on forums I've seen many men and women of the US Armed Forces discuss tricare and it appears to be a really mixed bag, and not to get into the political side of things where it's often used as a billy club against UHC, but nothing is 100% good or bad, some people I've seen say they haven't had issues, some people say they have and its shockingly bad and I have no reason to disbelieve either, from what I remember it's an issue of funding, it's an issue of technology, a lot of records are not digitized and so that can delay processing claims or getting records and the more overarching issue that's more broad is the general issue of mental health.

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I've been mostly lucky in that my experiences haven't been too bad. However, I've also seen people end up with permanent disabilities because they were not diagnosed and treated properly. Anecdotally, this seems to be somewhat of a class issue. Lower enlisted get treated as malingerers and not taken seriously. It's a very common and running joke in the military that 800 mg of ibuprofen is a cure-all. They just give them a temporary profile (medical slip that lets you have reduced physical duty) and pills and just repeat that cycle until something gets seriously broke. As you gain rank as an enlisted person it gets better and officers always have it pretty decent. It's not necessarily the capabilities, or the facilities that's the issue, most of the time (again anecdotally). It's a problem with the indifference of the workers, which is part of the problem when people like me talk about nationalized healthcare. You put it in the hands of the gov then the incentive for good care and service drops.

War is old men talking and young men dying and always will be... Well... Until Skynet comes along.

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If I've learned anything from the Terminator movies it's the lower technology beats higher technology so we should strap a tape deck onto a skate board and push it into the future.

CMPancake said:

No one really gives a **** about Veteran suicide at levels where it matters. The best, broad brush approach to improving your mental health is a balanced diet, exercise and sleep. Which, in the best of cases you'll only get two of those three. Every day I work 13 hour shifts handling a live Intel mission that's high stress. Then after 2 hours of exercise, I have 9 hours to eat, personal hygiene, and sleep. God forbid you're in a leadership role or have a family to take care of. That's just life in Garrison, on a deployment it would be a similar, if not higher optempo in a combat zone. Biologically speaking, our brains aren't wired for that level of stress day in, day out.

So yeah, wear your "22 until none" wristband and share the veteran suicide lifeline t shirt. But until active duty military changes how it treats the formation, and the VA improves and helps veterans transition we will only be treating the symptoms, not the underlying issues.

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This could be significantly fixed if we stopped playing Team American World Police. As it stands now, we don't have the numbers to fulfill the global missions we have so that leaves us right where we are at now, that you described above.

Fishking said:

This could be significantly fixed if we stopped playing Team American World Police. As it stands now, we don't have the numbers to fulfill the global missions we have so that leaves us right where we are at now, that you described above.

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I absolutely agree, but at the same time it would be incredibly hard to justify the absurdly large military budget if it is not for playing World Police. There would be no point to fund a garrison military, aside from lining the pockets of the big wigs in the military industrial complex.

CMPancake said:

I absolutely agree, but at the same time it would be incredibly hard to justify the absurdly large military budget if it is not for playing World Police. There would be no point to fund a garrison military, aside from lining the pockets of the big wigs in the military industrial complex.

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Well...we could save a lot of money, that's for sure. I'd still support a decent garrison at home because we still need global capabilities, even if we aren't using it. It's not something you want to try and play catchup if the **** hits the fan in the modern world. However, we have over 700 bases all over the world that could be almost completely cut. I wouldn't say all of them, because we do want key buffers in strategic areas.

apdst said:

Changed, not ****ed up. The troops that come backed ****ed up, not changed, were ****ed up before they went to war, the war brought it out.

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Changed, TO INCLUDE ****ed up.