Military Suicide

I am the last person who should be difficult to convince that research is important.

I have spent a big hunk or life doing clinical trials of psychiatric drugs for FDA approval.

But I am also a great fan of real life. Of listening to patients, something that my patients often complain other psychiatrists don’t have time to do.

Suicide in the military is reaching an all-time high — a soldier a day.

I go through the agonies of hell making as sure as a human possibly can that each and every one of my patients does not commit suicide. I screen them routinely in every single psychiatric evaluation and review it at every single visit.

“What makes you think about it? What means do you have, if you were to try? Where do the thoughts come from? What else can you do when you feel that way, to feel better?”

It is an obsessive and agonizing search for the truth that has led me to call the police and/or fire department to my otherwise quiet office in a southern California middle-class slab of concrete, as well as to wrench my soul enough to emit a primal scream which I dutifully repress.

I thought that it was basic. If you do this for a living, you value human lives.

People die, military people die, in wars where America has somehow been put into question.

I cannot believe that novel or unprecedented research was required for people to discern that victims of suicide chose that way out of a situation of “intense pain.”

It’s hard to question corpses about why they committed suicide.

When I was on active duty, the military asked me to do “Psychological Autopsies.”

I don’t know who, if anyone, ever saw my findings.

I had considerable evidence of “psychological pain.”

Harry S Truman was unquestionably right when he said “War is Hell.” But he could, I think, have gone a step further and said “Being a soldier is hell.”

Even though I am in a public insurance-based practice, I am treating several ex-soldiers for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

None of them, according to their stories, has ever been in combat, nor retrieved veterans benefits.

Something about being part of an institution that practices war (the military) is very abnormal.

Being a soldier is hell.