That 22 veteran suicides everyday number

I’ll begin by saying that even one veteran suicide death every year is too many for my liking. But 22 everyday has always seemed high to me – high enough that I figured I wouldn’t have any more readers at the end of the year. Chief Tango sends us a link to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker which took a look at how that number was arrived at a few years back;

This statistic comes from the VA’s 2012 Suicide Data Report, which analyzed death certificates from 21 states, from 1999 to 2011. The report calculated a percentage of suicides identified with veterans out of all suicides in death certificates from the 21 states during the project period, which turned out to be 22 percent. (By point of reference, about 13 percent of U.S. adults are veterans, according to a 2012 Gallup poll.) Then the report applied that percentage against the number of suicides in the U.S. in a given year (approximately 38,000). Divided by number of days in a year, the report came up with 22 veteran suicides a day.

[…]

To account for uncertainties, researchers gave a range of 18 to 22 veteran suicides a day, which is consistent with previous VA estimates using CDC data. The report does not include some states with the largest veteran population (including California, Texas, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina), so it is unclear how this would affect the rate.

They go on to report that average age of a veteran committing suicide is 59.6 years old – kind of outside of the perception that the younger veterans of the most recent wars are suicidal. Add to that, the fact that more than half of the veterans who commit suicide have never deployed, and you have to start wondering why it’s such a big deal these days all of a sudden.

Between 2001 and 2009, there were 1650 deployed veterans and 7703 non-deployed veteran deaths. Of those, 351 were suicides among deployed veterans and 1517 were suicides among non-deployed veterans. That means over nine years, there was not quite one veteran suicide a day.

It’s beginning to look to me as a way to make veterans seem like victims, once again. I’m not opposed to measures to prevent suicide, but when I see Richard Blumenthal (the fake Vietnam veteran Senator) and Paul Reickhoff (the phony special forces captain and ED of IAVA) together talking about an issue, I have to wonder if it’s something that we really need. And then we get to read John McCain regurgitating the 22 veterans/day number;

“According to a study published this month in the ‘Annals of Epidemiology,’ the rate of suicide among veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is approximately 50 percent higher than the rate among the general public, and a shocking 22 military veterans commit suicide each day,” McCain said. “Our nation has much work still to do to fulfill its responsibilities for our veterans, and this bill is an important step in improving life-saving mental health care services for the men and women who have served and sacrificed.”

It just all makes me wonder how much good will really come of a bill (S.167) that mostly calls for more studies and more reports to Congress from the Veterans’ Affairs Department that won’t even mount a hunt for phony POWs and hasn’t been telling Congress the truth for decades.

Well, at the end of the day, all of the Senators felt better about themselves for passing this bill, whether it does anything good or not. And isn’t that what’s really important?

Category: Veteran Health Care