Using our ideas from class, how might you make sense of this?
66 responses to “Rise in National Guard and Reserve suicides. What’s it all about? – 001 Blog”
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I thought this CNN report on suicidal thoughts following the return of soldiers in the army was very interesting. I wanted to first comment on the actual piece. I am in the College of Communications and my major is Broadcast Journalism so I look at TV reporting and pieces differently than most people. I thought the CNN anchor was asking questions that were too wordy and long. She was getting “word happy.” The interview should have been directed more at General McGuire but CNN’s Kyra Phillips was talking a lot. Ms Phillips should have let General McGuire speak more because an interview after all is about the interviewee and not the interviewer. But back to the sociology of the piece, soldiers that return home from war have such a difficult time getting readjusted to life. In war, soldiers have their comrades next to them at every point in the day and then they get back home and they are all alone. And they have to live with the horrors of war for the rest of their life. It is so sad because these soldiers were fighting for their country. A decision that they did not have to make and a decision that changed their life forever. I have the utmost respect for soldiers and they deserve better when they get home from the frontlines. I saw a very interesting advertisement for an HBO miniseries called “Wartorn 1861-2010”. It explores the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And PTSD in soldiers has occurred throughout our entire existence as a country. We have not taken it seriously until very recently and that is a step in the right direction. More has to be done for our country’s heroes and they deserve the best care and best resources. As the video talked about, the rates of suicide of soldiers is rising and we as a country have to do continue to take care of this problem. We cannot allow this to happen and steps need to be taken to care for our men and women who return home from war. I also found this piece fascinating because when we think of our soldiers we think that they are the best of the best and very strong individuals. They are definitely all of those things, I am not questioning that but I would never think that they would kill themselves and show weaknesses.
As all the weapons and command system are highly developed, the death rate of war tremendously decreased in U.S.military. But I was surprised about the high suicide rate and the way they kill them self. Like Sam said there are strings pulling them in the direction of suicide. Once those young men been to the military school they definitely gonna have a different experience than the ordinary people. Even if they have been trained years for battle they still can't handle the stress and psychic trauma in the war. Just like the man in the video said that he can't take these anymore and he can't go to sleep. But during the war, they have to fight for their country and obey orders. On one hand, once they back home, separate with the troop, they have time to think about what he've been through the war and that's nightmare for them. They cannot share what they have seen to their family and friends because they would have no idea what they went through without actually watching it happen. On the other hand, they're harder to find a new job as important as a soldier. To them, the normal life is not normal anymore. The hard time they have adjusting is a proven factor that leads people towards suicide. And another problem might be the reason why the suicide rate is increasing is divorce. Women usually leave there husbands while they on deployment. With the divorces happening more and more men are becoming lonely and have this thought of suicide. That makes the soldiers harder to get adjusted to the society. Not like Asia countries. Family bonding in US is not that tight. Family members sometimes may neglect how sad demobilized soldier are. Sometimes it’s easy to save a people’s life. Think about just before they committed suicide somebody called them and just told them they have lots of things to do and there’re many people just like him. That would be very useful. So I believe the military should offer more psychological help and therapy for our soldiers to help them cope and as a country we should completely support our soldiers and our nation. Meanwhile, lower the suicide rate of soldiers can attract more people to join the U.S.military.
I think the suicide issue with the military is something that every country must deal with, because regardless of where you are from, war will change you and there will be things you see that you could never have imagined that will twist your thoughts. The biggest problem with this issue is that soldiers have such limited access to help both on the front line and back at home. As we have discussed in class, many people who commit suicide do it because of events that happen in their lives where there is no easy way to talk to someone or seek help for. If these soldiers were given better mental and psychological help possibilities there would most likely be less people suffering from post traumatic stress disorder that could lead to suicide. Providing a better emotional and mental help center in addition to the already outstanding training facilities our troops have would also yield a much greater output as far as efficiency in combat, as soldiers would have less to worry about by working out their thoughts in between battles, as opposed to have a million thoughts running through their minds in addition to the ones focused on the task at hand.
Nobody living in America can say they know what goes on in the mind of a soldier, and I think it shouldn’t be up to politicians to make rules and budgets about how our troops are trained and taken care of. It seems pretty ignorant for the government to preach a weaker national defense, when in turn the people keeping us safe need more help available to them than people living in poverty, as they are the reason other countries are unable to walk into our homes and claim them for themselves. Back to the issue of suicide, soldiers need to feel a sense of help from home, and I feel that more help needs to be given to these soldiers. It is something that the politicians who make laws for their benefits can all agree is a necessity, as we cannot carry on other daily acts without first being safe from enemy nations.
The lifestyle of wartime soldiers can be categorized by strict regiment, quickly changing conditions, and servility to the objective. Many atrocities witnessed by American soldiers engaged in battle are unimaginable to us everyday citizens. Soldiers are trained to complete tasks in time of war that must be fulfilled with precision and without question. In order to exist in the military a routine of mindless conformity must be established. Questions are not only unacceptable but presented as extremely costly in the line of duty. While active duty instills many useful qualities in soldiers: discipline, responsibility, courage, etc, it may discourage many attributes necessary to carry out an everyday civilian existence. After a tour of duty soldiers are thrust back into society and expected to pick up with their lives as though their tour was just another job. Transitioning from combat to civilized society is a process that cannot be underestimated. The military must take many precautions from counseling services to job placement in order to mark a smooth re-assimilation to society.
From a sociologist’s standpoint, these soldiers appear to be experiencing anomie, or a state of normlessness when returning home from war. Kyra Phillips notes in her interview with Brigadier General Colleen McQuire, that 80% of incidents occur after soldiers return home. The army provides a very rigid structure that soldiers are forced to fall in line with. The structure serves every facet of life for young soldiers, telling them how to deal with each details of daily life. If each soldier is not on the same page, following the same protocol, it could mean lives. Being thrown back into civilian life creates a state of normlessness for soldiers who lived under a state of emergency. Many of the strings discussed by Dr. Richards are removed and replaced with the drastic switch. When these strings are removed anomie occurs. Anomic suicide hits those who have feelings of hopelessness; soldiers expected to function in a society that they have been physically and emotionally separated from can be very difficult. As a society we owe it to these soldiers to offer proper rehabilitation services for a smoother transition to civilian life.
The suicide rate and death due to overdoes of drunk driving within the soldiers once they get back home is larger than the death toll of the soldiers within the battle field. This statistics did not really surprise me as well, along with a few commenter's of this post. Based on the video, it is good that the military is indeed making changes in making sure that the soldiers are getting more help such as providing more chaplains and such. Even so, it is quite disappointing to know that it took them more than a year to really start helping out these soldiers.
If we were to look from the soldier's point of view, they have indeed endured or will eventually endure the cruel environment of war. I am sure that this has already been included in the intense training that these soldier had even before being qualified to be able to go into the battlefield. I am also quite positive that they would take pride in being able to take down the enemy. Some horrors that they might not have been prepared for are losing their own teammates, or perhaps regarding to what extent killing really means.
To look from a completely different perspective, soldiers who are trained extremely well to handle war-extreme conditions might be completely caught off-guard when they have prisoners held; inhuman tortures and procedures executed on the prisoners or hostages are something that the soldiers are most probably not taught to handle before hand. THEY themselves might have been trained to ENDURE those tortures themselves if they were captured by the enemy, but it is a whole different experience when you are the one performing the torture.
Having these shocking and bad experiences either from the battle field, or simply from the prison or place where the enemy was held captive and tortured, returning home to his or her family would certainly not aid to simply wash those experiences away. With these bad images and experiences, the soldier would not want to burden his or her family by talking about it with them; hence they tend to keep it to themselves. When this happens, the soldiers will feel isolated and feel that no one could help them or understand their feelings (other family members are not soldiers like them). He or she might also be afraid to seek help with this problem as they might see it as a 'weakness' for a soldier. Hence the alcohol, drugs, drunk driving and suicide.
Even though the video mentioned that they are indeed doing something about this issue, but I am still doubtful about to what extent is help actually being provided to these soldiers. As a matter of fact, they should actually change their training pattern to better prepare the soldiers to endure bad experiences, and not to simply tell them to 'man-up' and forget about it. They should be more well informed of what they could ACTUALLY experience besides the basic 'bloody' warzone. In addition, they should also be told that it is okay to admit that they have nightmares or problems due to what has happened to them or what they have seen or experienced. By doing this, they do not have to feel ashamed to admit that they have nightmares; they are indeed human beings like us. Providing a support center for the soldiers to go to BEFORE they go home, right after a war should be executed as well to help decrease the suicide rate, drug and alcohol abuse within the soldiers.
As a side note, improving the military procedures will most likely be favorable to all parties. Torturing prisoners or hostages definitely has its limits, but crossing these limits has caused these soldiers to also commit suicide as they could not handle the inhumanity. Though this might seem to be favoring the enemy, (whoever the enemy may be), but it is more in favor of our own troops and soldiers. So which one would you choose?
As someone taking sociology class I see this issue of high suicide rates and level of drug and alcohol abuse in the military as a major problem and that it is in many ways related to the social behavior and ways of the military. It seems like many of these soldiers are under a tremendous amount of stress associated with the job of being in a war and being under constant threat of being killed. To me, it seems like it is the way that these soldiers are dealing with the stress and anxiety of being at war is the problem. As the soldier in the video said, he couldn’t sleep at night because of the haunting things that he has seen and done, he is under terrible stress and has no decent way of dealing with the stress associated with his job.
It seems to me that many of these soldiers are having a very tough time dealing with the stresses of war. They have no outlet or way to get away from this problem. Many of the soldiers are trained to not regard themselves as individuals anymore and I think that this may have some to do with the high suicide rates. As we have discussed in class, soldiers are taught from day one that they are no longer individuals; they are members of a unit, a group. I feel that this loss of individuality has something to do with the high suicide rates. Many of these soldiers don’t view themselves as a person anymore, they just see themselves as this group and I feel that by not being their own person they are more inclined to feel that they are replaceable and disposable. The feeling of not being individually important, to me, is what probably causes some of these soldiers to be inclined to commit suicide. Also, I feel that as the woman in the army was saying there is not enough outreach for these soldiers, they have nowhere to go to and express their feelings and needs. She was saying that it was good that the soldier interviewed earlier was expressing his thoughts and feelings. I feel that a combination of lack of individuality and no where to express themselves is leading many of our soldiers to seek ways of freedom such as drug abuse and suicide to express their freedom.
I think the soldiers did amazing things for their country and also they are the bravest people out there to go to war putting their lives on the line to protect their own country. I was very surprised to see suicide rates in military has increased very high because from my dads personal experience when he was an adult who served as army in our country. He was once almost committed suicide when he was about 25 years old and I knew this would be a life changing experience for him. During that age most teens were having fun and socialize with their peers but instead he had to join the military to serve our country. In this case I would suggest them to have a psychological counseling for all the soldiers who dealing with their mental issues and stress throughout their everyday lives in the military. One thing that I discovered from personal perspective was that I believed most of the soldiers smoke because they need to release stress in their body. I have a dad who used to be in the military and my oldest old used to be in the military because he was hanging with the wrong group, therefore my dad helped to put him in a military for him to discovery himself how life would be like to be one of the soldier who had to survive through training and become a hard working person. I have seen some other videos of the war in Iraq, some of the soldiers were injured badly, some did not survive and some lost some parts of their bodies which was very sad to watch. I have never mentally or physically been in that situation but in way of sense I think I at least could feel in my forehead that how it would be like to lose any body part of myself. This is even becoming more stressful because after all those evidences happened, the soldiers knew that they would never be able to do something that they were able to do ever again in their entire life.
Hearing this upsetting news is not very surprising. Especially after what we learned about in class about suicide, it is not shocking that soldiers have a high rate of suicide. I remember being at a lecture in which a former war journalist talked about his experience being in Iraq. Although he was not a solider, he still experienced some very traumatic things. Not to disregard how intense and scary his job was, he was a journalist and still felt these effects after being in war, such as night terrors. It can be said that the soldiers who are actually fighting in the war experience the effects of war ten times more. Everything that they experience, from the homesickness, the shooting, the death, the foreign land is enough to make anyone go crazy, especially those soldiers during the actual war. And when they come home, those events still linger in their mind. They have to discover how to be a productive member of society. These strings, as mentioned in class, are pulling at them in all different directions. As said in the video above, some soldiers might turn to drugs or alcohol in order to cope. Others may not find such comfort, and eventually commit suicide. It is a shame that many soldiers turn to this later option, especially after performing such a brave and courageous act for their country. As the one soldier said in the interview, he cannot even sleep for fear of reoccurring images. If these people cannot even perform daily activities such as this, how can they possibly keep living a normal, happy life? It is easy to see why they would commit suicide.
The main soldier being interviewed in this video brought up a good point, to "erase the stigma of getting help". There is this embarrassing idea of going to therapy in our society. However, it is a perfectly normal, healthy and necessary thing. By providing another outlet for these soldiers can really help them out. Our entire society can do things that will help out these soldiers. It seems like their efforts, especially during this war, often go unnoticed. To let them know and see how grateful we are as a country could still give them a sense of purpose and well-being.
This video shows how each soldier is affected differently from the war. Even though all of our soldiers are better people after the war some go through dramatic stress and cannot live up to their full potential. This is something that the military has to deal with. Even after the war the policy "No Man Left Behind" should still be applied for our fellow soldiers. This should be applied because they risked their lives to keep are nation safe and free from harm for a larger portion of their life. Our soldiers go through a completely world different change when they go over sea and then return home after their tours are over. This change has to be extremely hard for the soldier to deal with the differences of the two societies. In the CNN report I agree with Gen. Colleen McGuire about the fact that we do need to reach out and get our soldiers to talk about these issue and go out and seek help before it is too late. It is like what we talk about in class if we were to talk about these social issue we could change a lot of wrong thing in our society and maybe even save many of our soldiers’ lives. In the open line of this interview “we are often more dangerous to ourselves then the enemy “this quote gives me the chills when I think that could be possible. It is not just suicide but our soldiers are coming home and are getting into high rick behavior because of the stress and things they dealt with oversea. In the one part of When Gen. McGuire is talk about they have 250 recommendations for the soldier to seek out for help; I believe this is a huge step for helping our soldiers. I believe many of the soldiers just do not know where to go to receive help. The last thing about these Interviews which our whole society has to help with is the idea of setting up programs to help our soldier make the transaction from being in the war to dealing with everyday society. These ideas I believe are all good ways to help our soldiers in the return home.
I feel that a lot of people in the military are turning to suicide as an answer to solve all their problems, especially after having experience in combat overseas. They feel that this is one of their only options they are exploring without seeming weak towards others and ultimately ending their pain and misery in the process. Why would they need to share their feelings with others and have that stigma of being preserved as a weak person who can’t handle these types of situations? Instead of living the rest of their lives in a state of fear and flashbacks, they want to put a definitive end to those images and the best and only way they see that is possible is to take their own life.
There has to be some sort of outlet in place for them that are viewed in the eyes of the military in a positive light as opposed to a negative one. I think that if something was established on the bases that everyone would have to go to after combat, including the head commanders, there might be fewer suicides as a result. Now, if you go to a psychologist or therapist to talk about your problems, that it is somewhat looked down upon in a negative way. Sort of like you aren’t capable of handling it on your own. A soldier feels that they are viewed lower to their superiors when all they really need is a healthy outlet to share all their problems with.
There are so many invisible strings at work that effect whether or not a soldier will take his own life due to stress. Was he or she brought up in as an Army brat? Are their parents strict and see emotional distress as a sign of weakness? Were they offered stress management courses before taking a tour of duty? How do they feel about psychologists? Was sharing your problems in boot camp shown as a sign of weakness? All these factors and numerous others are taken into account when reviewing the increased statistics of National Guard and Reserve suicides.