The Pentagon's
"Quick" Fix is NO FIX to Military Suicide
By: Rev. Dr. Chrys L. Parker, J.D., PTSD
specialist
It's an unfortunate irony
that the Defense Department apparently believes that its proposed ban on
servicepersons' privately owned guns will serve as a "silver bullet"
that will prevent or reduce suicide among service members.
Such a proposal, while
no doubt well intended, is reflective of the Pentagon's misguided and
ineffective search for quick and simplistic answers to complex problems of the
human psyche, which are the inevitable product of war. While the military is undoubtedly skilled in
marshalling men and regulating the use of arms on the battlefield, the ongoing battle
within the mind of the traumatized and suicidal soldier is of a very different
kind. The skills needed for the first
kind of battle are ineffectual in fighting the second.
The military was
designed to fight wars, and does so with competence. But as an institution, the military was
never designed to be the curer of wounded souls. When confronted with the alarming
psychological byproduct of war, the
military seeks to employ "default" solutions which, in its
estimation, will fix a problem through the issuance of orders.
Soldiers do not become suicidal simply because they possess weapons. And they will not avoid suicide, based on an
order not to possess them. After all,
suicide may just as easily be accomplished with a service weapon, and
frequently is. If possession of private weapons
is (erroneously) deemed to be the factor which initiates suicide, then we must
be led to the ludicrous conclusion that a ban on all weapons, including service weapons, would be in order if we are
to really get serious about reducing the rate of military suicide.
Obviously, the Pentagon is not logically
thinking this problem through to its thoroughly illogical conclusion. In a desperate move to find a quick
"fix" that can be implemented by legislation and M.P.'s, instead of
through appropriate, empathic and personally
rendered care, the military is firing without aiming first. It seeks to control the means of
suicide, without bothering to examine the reasons that warriors adopt
those means in the first place.
And, to be sure, there are plenty of means that remain available
to the suicidal serviceperson, whether private firearms are banned or not. It is
patently obvious that the nameless "senior Defense Department officials,"
who have concocted the suggested ban on private weapons, spend
little or no time whatsoever actually talking, working, or counseling with REAL
suicidal warriors, like the ones I see and counsel every day.
In coming to illogical
conclusions about what drives suicide, or by what means it is accomplished, the
Pentagon appears not to learn from its own reports. For proof of that, one may
look back at the DoD Epidemiological Report on Suicide for the year 2009, which references the number of
suicides accomplished by hanging.
Would the Pentagon
therefore propose that we inspect the house of every warrior for rope and seize
the household clothesline, as an "effective" plan for suicide
reduction? Having begun with private weapons, and moved
on to rope, should we also plan on
banning razors, kitchen knives,
motorcycles, and
automobiles, which are also prominent
instrumentalities of suicide?
The additional
suggestion that prescription drugs be removed from households by spouses of
"at risk" soldiers is irrational and ineffective. It presumes, first, that "at risk"
soldiers can be systematically identified.
Suicidal soldiers will be the first to tell you that if they are truly
serious about taking their lives, they will deliberately evade identification.
Assuming, however, that
a soldier is identified as genuinely "at risk" of suicide, that soldier
ought to be in treatment, NOT left sitting in his bathroom contemplating the contents
of the medicine cabinet. Having failed
to make adequate treatment accessible, the military is shifting the burden of
care to spouses, who are not the proper persons upon whose shoulders the
psychiatric management of soldiers should be foisted.
I am sure that the good
intentions of Dr. Jonathan Woodson, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, are
not to be doubted… only his ability to grasp the obvious. The "obvious" is that (l) removal
of prescription drugs may also serve to defeat the administration of bona fide medical
treatment; (2) removal of the drugs of one person would extend to removal of ALL drugs for
ALL family members ; and (3) a
suicidal soldier may obtain lethal drugs from many sources outside the home , including the $3.00 bottle of acetaminophen
(Tylenol) from the local drug store.
The illogic of these
proposals, not to mention their unconstitutionality, is astonishing.
"Orders" are
things the military knows well. Orders
lend, to the military, both the internal feeling and the public perception
that things are "under
control." Orders are calming,
because they make it appear that a problem has been put to rest. But "orders" are also utterly
ineffective to salve the deep wounds which cause many warriors to lose all
sense of meaning and all desire to live.
The only thing which this proposed order will put to rest, are the
lifeless bodies of soldiers who have ended their lives, in countless other
ways, despite the military's
"orders" that they not commit suicide by firearm.
As a mental health provider, as a Chaplain in service to military members
and veterans, and as a contract military trainer, it pains me to see the military utilize its
time, resources, and talented personnel in continually avoiding the nature of
the suicide problem, instead of addressing its underlying realities.
Suicide is not a
weapons problem, or a drug problem, any more than it is a rope or razor
problem. It is an existential
problem… a deep wound to soul and psyche of incalculable depth, which creates
an absolute belief in the mind of the warrior that his or her existence
is absolutely of no value or worth. This
is what drives suicide.
What is actually of no
value or worth in preventing suicide is the use of weapons bans,
prescription bans, or digitized slide shows which attempt to
"lecture" despairing soldiers into
living against their will, rather than by providing them the relational
care they need.
For some, suicide is
the only means of escaping the unremitting terrors of gruesome and horrifying
battles that are continually re-enacted in flashbacks which medication cannot
remedy. For others, suicide feels like
the only "adequate penance" for intense guilt over having survived
when one's buddies did not. For others
it is a reflection of the inability to "occupy" a body or soul that
has become soiled by the brutalities of war, or the deaths of others caused by
the performance of one's duty.
Every warrior who
suicides has his or her reason. But
whatever the reason, all suicides constitute a "final solution"
for people whose deep personal pain is
fed not by guns, but by mental,
social and spiritual isolation, exclusion,
and the knowledge that the relational support which they experience in the combat theater
is no longer present for them when they return to the rear.
It was my privilege to
go to the Iraqi theater in 2010. Now I
understand why warriors are at lesser risk of suicide in theater than they are
at home. There is not a single suicidal warrior
whom I counsel who would not willingly return to the war overseas, where men
and women are kept alive by the close relational bonds connecting those who
live, work and fight together and have a shared sense of life's meaning. Society, however, often defines meaning in
wholly different terms, into which some returning servicepersons no longer fit
in the light of what they have experienced. As a result they quickly feel unfit to
be a part of the society they risk so much to defend.
Sadly, where some servicepersons they believe
they DO "fit" is in deep, black emotional chasms into which warriors
fall soon after they return to a life that is full of material comforts, but
bereft of meaning.
No private weapons ban will instill the will
to live in warriors whose lives have been stripped of meaning. Stripping them of weapons will only encourage
them to look for other available exits from life.
Better that our military and our entire
society focus our attention less on the false comforts of quick fixes, and more
on providing empathic care, rendered shoulder to shoulder and face to
face. The hope that defuses suicidality
is not found in a military "no weapons" order, but in the eyes
of other human beings who truly care.
Rev.
Dr. Chrys L. Parker is co-author, along with Harry Croft, M.D., of the book I Always Sit with My Back to The Wall.
She is a clinical chaplain, pastoral counselor and trauma therapist who has
provided care for over 2,500 traumatized persons. Harry Croft M.D. is a former Army doctor and
psychiatrist who has evaluated more than 7,000 veterans with PTSD. Visit www.mybacktothewall.com
