Sun editorial:

Being there for veterans

A VA suicide hotline set up last year is credited with saving 726 lives so far

Friday, April 18, 2008 | 2:08 a.m.

Twenty-two-year-old Joshua Omvig shot himself in his truck outside his parents’ home in Grundy Center, Iowa, on Dec. 22, 2005. A local newspaper reported that he had talked to his mother shortly before killing himself. Among his final words: “I’ve been dead ever since I left Iraq.”

An Army Reserve military policeman, Omvig served 11 months in Iraq after being deployed in February 2004. A Web site created in tribute to Omvig, who had wanted to be a policeman since his high school days, says he died of “untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Also paying tribute to Omvig was Congress, which in 2006 passed the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act. From this legislation grew programs within the Veterans Affairs Department ensuring greater attention to mental health issues.

A suicide hotline for veterans (1-800-273-8255) was one of the programs. It was set up in July at the VA hospital in Canandaigua, N.Y.

A newspaper in nearby Syracuse, The Post-Standard, published a follow-up story this week, and the statistics it cited show the continuing need for this first and only hotline specific to veterans issues.

The paper reported the estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that 5,000 U.S. veterans a year commit suicide. Since July the hotline has received 37,000 calls, and the mental health professionals providing around-the-clock help at five phone lines (a sixth is soon to open) credit the program with preventing 726 suicides.

Some calls go on for hours, the paper reported. It quoted Jan Kemp, who supervises the hotline, as saying, “People have called from bridges and from the middle of the woods. They’ve called with guns and pills in their hand to say ‘goodbye,’ to express anger at the VA or the military or family or friends.” Some of the suicidal veterans are in agony from war wounds.

Congress and the VA performed a vital public service in getting this long-needed hotline under way. Further evidence of that was contained in a report released Thursday by the RAND Corp. that concluded 300,000 U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from major depression or post-traumatic stress.

Veterans were there when the country urgently needed them, and it is only right that the country be there when veterans have an urgent need of their own.

Discussion: 1 comment so far…

By Johnathan_Abbinett

4/18/08 at 1:35 p.m.

Suggest removal

This program has been long over-due as the suicide rate of veterans has skyrocketed!

Better late than never - but, it's going to take a lot more than a 1-800 number, and a patient counselor on a long-distance line, only able to listen and refer the vet to local help. Local help by the way that they state "is required to get back to you within 48 hours" and "if they don't call you - call us back on the 1-800 line so we can try and follow-up" WOW!

Imagine the possibilities of what can happen in 48 hours?

They claim they've prevented 726 suicides out of 37,000 calls - I wonder what happened to the other 36,274 callers?

That's 1.9 tenth of 1% - sounds about right given that here in Vegas we only address about 1% to 10% of all the mental health needs we know statistically exists in the valley - when are we going to get around to addressing the other 90% to 99% of cases that go unaddressed and untreated?

Probably never!

The amount of PTSD from a generation of Vietnam Veterans was just a prelude to the tsunami of cases that are coming home from the Unjust War in Iraq - another generation of our nations best and brightest will suffer from PTSD for the rest of their foreshortened natural lives!

And the V.A. and the Vet Centers know they are no where near ready for massive numbers needing treatment - our national shame of how we have historically failed to keep our promise to care for our veterans is about to turn into nothing short of a national nightmare!

This is why it is so very, very imporant never, ever to send young people into an unnecessary, illegal, unethical, immoral Unjust War - it breaks their hearts, twists their minds and the horrors haunt their souls and spirits every night forever - not to mention the daily flashbacks and a dozen other symptoms of PTSD!

We've taken the poorest of the poor, many out of gang-land neighborhoods, professionally trained them well with automatic weapons and sent them in small teams to kick-in doors in the Unjust War in Iraq - we had better make the necessary paradigm shift in our thinking about PTSD and quickly getting these veterans into treatment and not letting them fall into homelessness and chronic depression!

If America fails this generation of vets - how many will return home and join, or start, their own gangs - kicking in doors in our neighborhoods?

In truth, they've been changed forever, and could be (with proper treatment and re-training) some of our best public service safety personnel - if we just addressed their needs and helped them re-store their dignity. Instead of risking becoming gangsters - we could turn them into some of the best firemen, police and S.W.A.T. officers ever to serve - and they sure would be well motivated to serve in a key role with Homeland Security - it's all about getting them the treatment they need and restoring their dignity so they can continue to do their duty with honor to country!

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