On June 27th, I hosted a Special Order speech on the House floor to raise awareness of veteran Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I chose this date for a reason: June was National PTSD awareness month, and June 27th was National PTSD Awareness Day.
According to the National Center for PTSD, ten percent of all Veterans suffer from PTSD. PTSD is the leading cause of the Veteran suicide epidemic, claiming between 17 and 44 Veteran lives each and every DAY – a cumulative loss of nearly 150,000 Veteran lives since 9/11. This figure is 21 times greater than the 7,000 servicemembers we lost in post-9/11 warzones, making PTSD exponentially more lethal than combat.
22 vets a day commit suicide. There should be a lot more done about it. I didn't realize how bad the problem of veteran suicides was until I was reading comics on Facebook by Art by Karla, who was a Coast Guard and dealt with sexual assault while in. She made me aware of the statistics through her comics, and her link to https://www.22aday.org
ReplyDeleteI think that real issue is that the military is no longer mentally preparing our men for war. They focus so much on touchy feely garbage and ambiguous, politically correct ROEs, how can our men not be traumatized by the decisions they have to make on the modern battlefield? So medicate the ones for whom it's too late, but let's start preparing them beforehand so they won't be traumatized to begin with.
ReplyDeleteNailed it!
DeleteThat's far later in the process - it begins at home, and in school, with helicopter/seagull parents who coddle their children.
DeleteI think part of the problem is the focus on combat vets, rather than all vets.
ReplyDeletetell a guy who was on the deck of the Forrestal in '68 that he didn't see some serious shit.
hell, tell any flight deck guy that saw one of his friends run through a propeller, or through an engine, or over the side because some hotshot helicopter pilot came in too hard, that what he saw and did didn't count. it wasn't "combat". no one was shooting at them. but it doesn't make it less real.
also, if they seek help, they shouldn't be treating people who seek help like they're hand grenades with the pin pulled. don't grab all of his stuff, take away his drivers license, and treat him like he's about to turn into rambo and kill the whole place. if he's seeking help, he's already 3 steps down the right path away from that. treat him as such.
or the person's command treating him/her like a pariah or a wimp because they are seeking help for a problem can't solve on their own.
DeleteNemo
If we took the money we piss away on illegals and put that towards treatment, wellness and making sure they are getting the best opportunities in housing and jobs we would be a far greater nation than we are today
ReplyDeleteJD
If this country would stop fucking around in other countries business, this tragedy would be far less of a problem. This country treats it's .mil vets like shit! Criminal aliens get better treatment. What a shame!
ReplyDeleteTom762
Indeed. Someone can illegally invade the United States, commit all manner of crimes in our lands, and still be treated better than the military. Most of the world is angry with us because we have spent the last several decades provoking them to violence, and refuse to stop destabilizing them or funding terror on their doorsteps.
Delete- Arc
Opinions are like A-holes, everyone has one and here's mine. I was in the service for 37 years and I can tell you how I feel right now. I feel like I wasted 37 years of my life protecting a bunch of corrupt sh1thead pols who didn't give a sh1t about me or my brothers.
ReplyDeleteIf it was just another job, it would be different but for a lot of us it was our lives on the line to protect what the dems/leftists have destroyed.
Hopelessness leads to suicide.
Enough of the platitudes, y'all sound like an eighth-grade speech contest or a Miss America question-and-answer. So what's the specifics? Blank check for the V.A.? Blank check for some well-connected psycho-babble organization and endless lawsuits if a Christian counseling wants to be involved? A million bucks to anyone who served and gets a psychologist to check the box for diagnosis? Plus/Instead of whatever they might be getting from SSI? p.s. No, we don't have the money, and you need to do better than just say "take it from the illegals", that's the conflation of issues that leads to tangled knots, and by the way, that's all borrowed money too. What I want to know is "just name a final dollar amount and sign here in front of everybody PAID IN FULL" because otherwise this will be a constant back-and-forth well-worn path to raiding the Treasury with endless appeals. Other than that, solve it locally, and stop looking to D.C. to fix everything. Because this country being broke and acting like it's the answer to everybody's everything, well... IT'S STRESSING ME OUT, where's my million bucks to make me feel better?
ReplyDeleteI would rather " borrow " money to help a down on his/her luck vet that is making an effort with their lives than to piss it away on illegal pieces of shit all day every damn day....
DeleteI don't see where you did anything but bitch and moan so fuck off asshole
JD
No, no, no. June is the month we celebrate fudpuckers and other assorted animals.
ReplyDeleteNot only are they inept at serving the vets. They also have a serious problem of approving work and ignoring the invoice. The good news is that their balance has fallen from half a million to just under 200k dating back upto five years. If you think it tough to get an answer out of them just wait until they owe you money...
ReplyDeleteFor the first ten years in, I thought PTSD was bullshit. Then we played world police in Panama, Gulf War One, Somalia and the “former Yugoslav Republic” games. And few third world shitholes nobody cares to mention. And a command structure that didn’t give a shit about what you had done, but what you have done lately. I witnessed some pretty tough dudes start breaking and realized we had a problem. Not everyone, but damn near. Most found a way to put that shit in a box and lock it away, some just can’t. God knows I’d do anything to help them, but I have no idea what the answer is. I look around today and wonder what the hell I was thinking for so long.
ReplyDeleteHanding out SSRI's( Prozac etc) like candy doesn't help either. Over 90% of mass shooters were on SSRI's.
ReplyDeleteThe overwhelming majority of people shouldn't be on any battlefield in the first place, their "leaders" and parasitical politicians should be. There is nothing tough and manly about warping the minds of a bunch of 17-26 year old kids and sending them into an arena to see who can kill the other first, especially when our lands aren't even under attack. We need to prep our strong men for making families here in the United States, not destroying other countries.
ReplyDeleteTHE solution is to tar and feather our parasites, and to not send any more blood and treasure to foreign powers and foreign wars in the first place. I'll make an exception and say we can send the politicians and their families instead, followed by all of the volunteers that believe in fighting for that cause, and all those profiting from it. The bloodthirsty and greedy can go fight without dragging with them everyone else that wants peace. I have no desire to travel to a foreign land, to murder foreign people, who I have never met, nor have ever wronged me or even my people. I think a lot of trauma, and the anger, comes from realizing we have been the bad guys for the last several decades, and still are.
The causes of the suicide problem are blatantly obvious, but command looks away and pretends it's all a big mystery. Part of the suicide rate is due to the rampant nepotism, assault, sexual assault, rapes, command incompetence, the bureaucracy of getting anything fixed or done, and layers of generational bullshit that comes with the military.
Some examples: PFC Holmes was run over and killed by a bulldozer because the battalion commander of 3/3 wanted to make training more realistic by forbidding chemlight markers for fighting holes; nothing happened to him. One kid in a sister company was bent over his rack and anally raped with a mop handle by his leadership. I was sexually humiliated by my squad leadership several times, one incident was even filmed, and my peers went along with it. My squad leader in Afghanistan asked me if I would cover for him if he "accidentally" shot the wrong person; I doubt he liked my answer.
We were treated worse than mashed dog shit on the bottom of a boot, we were utterly disposable, and my friends from other branches had similar treatment. In hindsight, very little of my time in the infantry had anything to do with training to fight, rather it was an overall degrading experience. The escapes are limited and often require destroying your life, either through going AWOL, doing drugs, or dying. The warrior class is better off taking up three-gun, hiking, and shop classes or trade skills (see front line forces in Ukraine), rather than joining the "military".
The elusive White male is turning up in recruitment videos again, a sign the parasites are prepping to send us into their new war. I and several friends will NOT go back, nor will we be like Ukrainians being meekly abducted. I like the "Keep calm and return fire." image to the right here; we shall not comply with any draft.
- Arc
PTSD vs PTSD phenomena. You are in a wreck, survive a plane crash or see some horrible thing and ptsd can set in. However, the combat vet experiences those horrors over and over. A soldier is in a fire fight. He can't go to the Sarge and say, dang I found that stressful I won't do it again. It's like surviving the plane crash and getting on another plane and crashing again over and over. With that abnormal behaviors develop in essence to keep you from going nuts. That is where and when ptsd phenomena begins. Point is, there are different levels of ptsd.
ReplyDelete