U.S. Army suicides reached record monthly high in July

By Collen Jenkins
Reuters
Originally published August 17, 2012

Twenty-six active-duty soldiers are believed to have committed suicide in July, more than double the number reported for June and the most suicides ever recorded in a month since the U.S. Army began tracking detailed statistics on such deaths.

During the first seven months of this year, there were 116 suspected suicides among active-duty soldiers, compared to 165 suicides for all of last year, the Army said. The military branch reported 12 likely suicides during June.

(cut)

"Suicide is the toughest enemy I have faced in my 37 years in the Army," General Lloyd J. Austin III, vice chief of staff of the Army, said in the report released on Thursday.

"To combat it effectively will require sophisticated solutions aimed at helping individuals to build resiliency and strengthen their life coping skills," he said.

The entire story is here.

Sexual Assault In The Military

The Huffington Post Live
Originally posted August 15, 2012

Actress Jennifer Beals joined a HuffPost community discussion Wednesday afternoon on sexual assault in the military. Beals sat down with HuffPost Live host Janet Varney, former Staff Sgt. Sandra Lee, and president of the organization Protect Our Defenders, Nancy Parrish, who blogged on HuffPost in late July on the topic.

Here is the third segment:

The entire page is here.

War Wounds

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times - Sunday Review
Originally published on August 10, 2012

IT would be so much easier, Maj. Ben Richards says, if he had just lost a leg in Iraq.

Instead, he finds himself losing his mind, or at least a part of it. And if you want to understand how America is failing its soldiers and veterans, honoring them with lip service and ceremonies but breaking faith with them on all that matters most, listen to the story of Major Richards.

For starters, he’s brilliant. (Or at least he was.) He speaks Chinese and taught at West Point, and his medical evaluations suggest that until his recent problems he had an I.Q. of about 148. After he graduated from West Point, in 2000, he received glowing reviews.

(cut)

Military suicides are the starkest gauge of our nation’s failure to care adequately for those who served in uniform. With America’s wars winding down, the United States is now losing more soldiers to suicide than to the enemy. Include veterans, and the tragedy is even more sweeping. For every soldier killed in war this year, about 25 veterans now take their own lives.

President Obama said recently that it was an “outrage” that some service members and veterans sought help but couldn’t get it: “We’ve got to do better. This has to be all hands on deck.” Admirable words, but so far they’ve neither made much impact nor offered consolation to those who call the suicide prevention hot line and end up on hold.

The military’s problems with mental health services go far beyond suicide or the occasional murders committed by soldiers and veterans. Far more common are people like Richards, who does not contemplate violence of any kind but is still profoundly disabled.

The entire story is here.

Telephone therapy technique brings more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans into mental health treatment

Medicalxpress.com

Originally published July 26, 2012

A brief therapeutic intervention called motivational interviewing, administered over the telephone, was significantly more effective than a simple "check-in" call in getting Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with mental health diagnoses to begin treatment for their conditions, in a study led by a physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.

Participants receiving telephone motivational interviewing also were significantly more likely to stay in therapy, and reported reductions in marijuana use and a decreased sense of stigma associated with mental health treatment.

The study was published electronically recently in General Hospital Psychiatry (May 25, 2012).

Lead author Karen Seal, MD, MPH, director of the Integrated Care Clinic at SFVAMC and an associate professor of medicine and psychiatry at UCSF, noted that 52 percent of the approximately half-million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans currently being seen by the VA have one or more mental health diagnoses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety or other related conditions.

The entire story is here.

Coalition Responds to Invitation from APA's "PENS II" Task Force

The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology has been invited to nominate a consultant to “review materials” for the American Psychological Association’s so-called “member-initiated task force.” This task force purports to “reconcile policies related to psychologists’ involvement in national security settings.” We have declined the invitation because we reject both the aims and the legitimacy of this task force (hereafter referred to as “PENS II”) – and we discourage others from participating.

The entire response is here.

Others posts about the PENS report can be found by searching this blog via the "search" function.

Here is a portion of the response:

"Since the PENS Report became APA policy in 2005, subsequent APA policies related to interrogations (with the exception of the Referendum) have been framed in ways largely consistent with the PENS Report. As such, they are all “fruit of a poisoned tree.” Any constructive attempt to consolidate national security policies must therefore begin with annulment of the PENS Report in order to remove its corrosive influence on the profession of psychology and on the unexamined proliferation of operational psychology in coercive contexts.

The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology unequivocally rejects collaboration with the illegitimate PENS II “task force” and calls for its dissolution. We further encourage others to refuse to collaborate with this effort aimed at undermining true reform. PENS II is built upon faulty premises. If successful, it would enshrine one of the darkest initiatives in APA policy-making."