Much focus has been placed on the increasing number of military suicides, up from 18 a day in 2007 to 22 in 2010, heaviest among Marines. Concern was centered on post-traumatic stress disorder or the frustrations of fighting wars that seemed unwinnable amidst a populace that really didn’t want a continuing lingering of American occupation. The lands were foreign, exotic and anything but hospitable. That is what experts first thought, but then the medical and psychological professionals realized that military suicide statistics really had to be examined within the context of the overall times and the overall suicide statistics that plagued the civilian population as well. After all, soldiers and veterans reflect the world around them too. A Department of Veterans Affairs report released on February 1st – based on a statistical analysis of 147,000 suicides in 21 states – narrowed the inquiry.
With clear decreases in average family earning power in the United States, chronic hopeless job pursuits among older workers (but still too young for retirement) with under employment in large segments of the population, strong anti-bankruptcy provisions applied to recent student loans, a housing market that is still in relative collapse and general loss of confidence in the system, suicides as a whole are up all over the United States.
Indeed, the civilian numbers appear to be worse than in our armed forces. While there was a 22% increase in military suicides from 1999 to 2010, the increase during the same period in the civilian world was 31%. The number of soldiers and veterans committing suicide during that time period became an even smaller percent of the total. Soldiers and veterans have better access to healthcare than does the general population, but what is particularly interesting is the age at which there was a serious spike in veteran suicides – between ages 50 and 59 – that awkward pre-retirement age when many realize that life’s options are just plain running out in an economy that clearly no longer favors the middle class and is particularly harsh for those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
“‘What’s happening with veterans is a reflection of what’s happening to America,’ Jan Kemp, the national mental health director for suicide prevention at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said in an interview. ‘The suicide rate in America has been creeping up… Dr. Kemp said the fact that veterans accounted for a smaller percentage of the nation’s suicides suggested that improved outreach and suicide prevention programs might have had an effect. ..The new report does not provide a suicide rate for veterans, because the department is still refining that number, Dr. Kemp said. But she acknowledged that the rate was higher than for the general population, which is 12.4 suicides per 100,000 people… Dr. Kemp said veterans tend to fall into higher-risk groups, which include: being male; living in a rural area, particularly in the West; and having access to firearms.” New York Times, February 1st.
But Congress is going to continue its cutting ways, with the House particularly believing in the necessity of austerity policies that have already tanked the European economy into a seemingly never-ending resurging recession. As the fiscal cliff legislation effort showed in the last quarter of 2012, threatening to remove and removing massive government spending from the economy freezes corporate growth, kills consumer confidence and actually contracts the GDP. The empathy-lacking focus on cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits for those who need it most – let our elected Congress members have those as their sole retirement/medical benefits – is callous and impacts those who are least able to fight back. But as Congress knows, if the retirement options are really awful, and if Medicare and Social Security do not fill the void, Americans do have another exit strategy.
I’m Peter Dekom, and how strange is it for America to pursue a heartless austerity policy that has failed so completely miserably in Europe?
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