H16019
Headlines : "War on Terror"120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq. Do the math. That’s a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn’t it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
[Posted By ShiftShapers]Republished from AlterNet
Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone — and remember, this is just in 45 states — there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I…
Posted by ShiftShapers
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Posted by ShiftShapers on Saturday, November 17th 2007
Is anyone aware whether soldiers where given SSRI during their service?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_inhibitor)
I have a hunch they where given a cocktail of antidepressants and other medication with their vacinations. Suicidal depressions are common when you stop taking SSRI.
That would explain a great deal. Those Psycho Marines, for one thing. Does SSRI also make you a bit of a moron?
40 % of all soldiers that have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness.
See also :
US Army reports rising desertion rates
OPEN QUOTE
According to the US Army, 4,698 soldiers—about 9 in every 1,000—deserted in the fiscal year ending September 2007. Over the same period, the Department of Defense reported 1,163 total US deaths and 8,190 wounded. Overall, desertion is the largest cause of personnel attrition — over fatalities and injuries —serious enough to result in military discharge.
PAUSE also of interest from that same piece
The great majority of deserters during the Vietnam-era had been conscripted; by comparison, the “all-volunteer” composition of the current military— drawn almost entirely from the poorest layers of the working class and secured with enticements of signing bonuses and college tuition—has undoubtedly acted as a suppressant upon desertion rates.
Over the past few years, the proportion of Army recruits without high school diplomas has risen from fewer than 10 percent to 24 percent. About 20 percent of current recruits would not have been accepted before the Iraq invasion, including a higher percentage of recruits issued “moral waivers” for criminal records. The Army has also increased monetary inducements for officers, including bonuses of up to $35,000 to retain sergeants and other mid-level commanders.
Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s senior military assistant, Peter Chiarelli, asserted that the military must be better structured for open-ended occupation. According to a piece by Art Pine in the National Journal November 12, Chiarelli wrote, “Like it or not, until further notice the US government has decided that the military largely owns the job of nation-building…. We need to accept this reality instead of resisting it.”
What I do know is that SSRI and similar newer versions of Seratonin Inhibitors make you a bit senseless.
I also know that Donald Rumsfeldt is part owner of the farmacuetical company Gilead Science that owned the rights to the Bird Flu Vaccine: Tamiflu that was forced upon the world using pandemic scare tactics recently. Perhaps they also own other psychoaltering drugs they want the taxpayers to pay for.
Also, soldiers have been guniea pigs for all sorts of drug/vaccine related test including LSD and Anthrax. see Gulfwar Syndrome.
A cocktail of SSRI and other antidepressants would make sense when you send stupid young kids to a meaningless war where they are to hurd civilians around like cattle. In that case the suicides may be assisted by US Army negligence.
At leats they aren’t giving them a mixture of MAOIs and DMT, that should only be done somewhere you can enjoy it :)
Just a simple correction to Cicero’s posting on SRRIs. They are not inhibitors. They simply work by occupying the recaptation enzyme location, thus helping to make serotonin slowly rise in the brain. They take close to 6 weeks to produce any real effect and do not address trauma related psychological injury.
US Army Reports Rising Desertion Rates: After a decline in desertion rates following an initial exodus before the preemptive strikes on Afghanistan and Iraq, the military is recording a rise in the number of soldiers who abandon their posts. The Associated Press reported November 16 that desertions this year stand 80 percent higher than in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq.
Army Suicides reach record high – study: Suicide rates among active-duty US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have reached a record high, according to mental-health statistics made public on Thursday.
At leats they aren’t giving them a mixture of MAOIs and DMT, that should only be done somewhere you can enjoy it
Ecstasy trials for combat stress