PTS myths
Ex-PH2 sends us a link to NBC News entitled “What you think you know about veterans is probably wrong“. I expected it to be a POS article about how veterans are blood-lusting mass murderers, because it was written by two people, Sally Satel and Richard J. McNally from the Atlantic. But it turns out that the article is just the opposite.
They track the myth of the crazed veteran from it’s hippie roots after Vietnam, through Hollywood depictions and eventually they get to the actual truth about vets with PTS and the suicide scourge;
[O]ne of the most important forms of care a veteran can receive is the work itself. Based upon our experience with patients, work is the single most effective key to easing financial stress, marital tensions, and the void of loneliness. Unfortunately, unemployment among veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is almost 10 percent, above the national average.
The Department of Veterans’ Affairs puts the numbers of veterans who die by suicide at between 18-22 per day. While the percentage of all suicides nationwide reported as “veteran” has decreased since 2000, the absolute number of suicides by veterans has increased. Yet over half of the veterans who died by suicide last year were over 50 years of age; far fewer were from the post-9/11 cohort.
Contrary to expectation, the roots of suicide do not appear to lie in the number or extent of deployments, exposure to combat, or to PTSD itself, as data from the massive US Millennium Cohort Study indicate.
In fact, according to a study featured in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2013, over half of all active duty personnel who died by suicide between July 2001 and December 2008 were never deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and 77 percent of all personnel who died by suicide never saw combat.
Of course, at TAH we’ve been broadcasting those simple facts for years, but no one is listening – the solution for veterans is put them to work, and you have nothing to fear from them if you do give them a job.
Category: Veterans Issues
Golly, someone in BIG MEDIA spoke some truth. Yeah, we’ve been singing the same song here for years and part of our recommended solutions is front-end screening. Another is focusing keenly on alcohol and drug abuse. Then, when the actives become our newest Veterans, ensure they have a continuing sense of self worth and value by providing them with decent jobs, training, and education. It ain’t rocket science.
Whoa! Who hit them with the clue bat? Real research being reported finally.
@2, I suspect that there was a lot of sobbing and drinking as they typed that out.
What’s next, an actual scrutinization of sexual assault in the military? Remember that issue? It was all the rage for a month or so and then, like a snowflake on the water, it was gone. I can’t help but think someone, somewhere actually realized that the thousands (26,000 as I recall) of reports were based on an anonymous survey which damn near included thinking impure thoughts as a form of sexual assault and said, “How many filed complaints were there? Huh? How many!? Oh, well, we had better kill that story for now.”
Our veteran owned business regularly hires veterans without issue. I think the media is the only part of the nation that is so f#cking clueless about what veterans really are, which is hard working good citizens like most of the rest of the nation.
The real criminals in America are those 3 out of 100 people who think they don’t need to conform to society’s rules. At some point maybe the other 97 will wake the f#ck up and start killing those 3 sh1tbags regularly…then those of us in the 97 can live our lives as peaceably as we can imagine…
Finally
What’s next, an actual scrutinization of sexual assault in the military? Remember that issue? It was all the rage for a month or so and then, like a snowflake on the water, it was gone.
No, it isn’t — it’s with us still and will be for a long time, and Congress is still mucking around with military justice to try to ensure that there are more convictions. The story hasn’t been and won’t be killed, because it reaffirms ideological views that are popular in the press and the academy, and because it gives people an excuse to look down on the military.
I can’t help but think someone, somewhere actually realized that the thousands (26,000 as I recall) of reports were based on an anonymous survey which damn near included thinking impure thoughts as a form of sexual assault and said, “How many filed complaints were there? Huh? How many!? Oh, well, we had better kill that story for now.”
You don’t understand the rape-guilt ideologue’s mentality. If anonymous people on anonymous surveys report “some kind of sex assault” way more often than live humans report it to the authorities…to them that is simply proof that there are massive numbers of unreported assaults going on.
Something similar occurs if you compare the numbers for prison “sexual victimization” at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The numbers reported by prisoners in anonymous surveys are way, way higher than the numbers reported to prison officials…and the prison officials find that about 7/8 of the reports to them are false (or did up until 2008; there haven’t been any numbers published for reports by prison officials since 2008).
This doesn’t surprise me because lots of prisoners lie and love to play the victim card…but to a rape-guilt ideologue, what this means is that prison is a nonstop rape party with everyone who’s not actively raping someone taking part in a “conspiracy of silence” to hush it up…)
@7. Thanks for the link. I see that Boxer, McCain, and Graham are on the issue. What could possibly go wrong?