our vets and suicide - where the personal is political

On Thursday, April 4, 2013, I had the privilege of interviewing one of my clients for Storycorps http://storycorps.org/ (weekly broadcasts can be heard on NPR's Morning Edition).  She is the surviving mother of an Iraq war vet and has given me permission to write a bit about this in my blog.  Her son committed suicide last year.  Because of his mother, at least part of this young man's story will now be archived at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.  I know she wishes he were here to tell his own story.   He was a loving, generous, sensitive, handsome young man who struggled with addiction, depression, and PTSD.

Because of my work with his mom, I tend to think of their story as personal, rather than political.  But in the course of my experience as her 'interviewer', I heard their story in a new way.  I heard another thread in the fabric of the story - the ongoing failure of the military, the government, and in some ways the governed, to adequately support our service men and women both while they are active duty and when they come home after deployment.

If you have not read this editorial in Sunday's editorial section of the New York Times, you must.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/opinion/sunday/wars-on-drugs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
As many of us know already, last year, more active duty soldiers died as a result of suicide than have died in combat.  

According to Richard Friedman, who wrote the piece,  "Worse, according to data not reported on until now, the military evidently responded to stress that afflicts soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan primarily by drugging soldiers on the front lines. Data that I have obtained directly from Tricare Management Activity, the division of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, shows that there has been a giant, 682 percent increase in the number of psychoactive drugs — antipsychotics, sedatives, stimulants and mood stabilizers — prescribed to our troops between 2005 and 2011. That’s right. A nearly 700 percent increase — despite a steady reduction in combat troop levels since 2008"

Friedman posits that they are being used as sedatives and to treat PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).  And, he raises concerns about the efficacy of the drugs used - are they being used for their FDA approved purpose?  Do we know what effect these drugs such as, Topamax, Neurontin and Lyrica, Valium, and Klonopin, will have on our soldiers in the long run?

We've heard it said that the mark of a civilized society is the way it treats its most vulnerable members.  It's strange to think about soldiers as vulnerable members of our society, but I believe they are.  They are often young.  They are asked to give up their own autonomy in the stated purpose of defending our freedom and democracy.  This is vulnerability to me and I am deeply dismayed at the gaps in our system.

A lot of people have a hard time believing in God, because they can't explain it.  What can I tell my kids about God, they think, because I don't know what I'd say.  Well, I have a hard time believing in war.  I have a hard time explaining war to my kids.

I would like to say, in all sincerity, no matter how naive, that I hope one day war and violence will not be used as a solution to conflict.  Until then,  I hope to do my part to help close the gaps in a system that emotionally and psychologically wounds the human beings who are tasked with the unexplainable.