PTSD being a stigma that can be widely interpreted…
I know a civilian MIL Psych Counselor who says when ever in doubt they just put the soldier “on the list” and cover their ass in case the soldier offs self or someone else.
“With nearly half of all suicides in the military having been committed with privately owned firearms, the Pentagon and Congress are moving to establish policies intended to separate at-risk service members from their personal weapons.”
“…Defense Department officials are developing a suicide prevention campaign that will encourage friends and families of potentially suicidal service members to safely store or voluntarily remove personal firearms from their homes.”
“…the campaign would also include measures to encourage service members, their friends and their relatives to remove possibly dangerous prescription drugs from the homes of potentially suicidal troops.”
“…Congress appears poised to enact legislation that would allow military mental health counselors and commanders to talk to troops about their private firearms. The measure, which is being promoted by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, would amend a law enacted last year that prohibited the Defense Department from collecting information from service members about lawfully owned firearms kept at home.”
“…The new amendment, part of the defense authorization bill for 2013 that has been passed by the House of Representatives but not by the Senate, would allow mental health professionals and commanders to ask service members about their personal firearms if they have “reasonable grounds” to believe the person is at “high risk” of committing suicide or harming others.”
“…“I am troubled that on the one hand we are saying we are doing all we can to decrease suicide and on the other making it so easy for service members to buy weapons,” Dr. Ritchie said.”
“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.”
So . . .
How are active-duty soldiers commiting suicide with personally owned firearms in war zones . . .
This shit always gets totally fucked up when some administrative flack or bureaucrat tries to write an official “cover your ass” institutional policy statement or protocol.
Any mental health counselor or health care practitioner would be completely dropping the ball if they didn’t assess a client suffering from PTSD or depression for suicidal ideation. If the client has entertained suicidal thoughts, the next question is “have you ever had a plan and, if so, what was it?” And, if the plan involved a gun or prescription pills or whatever, then the next question is “do you have access to a gun (or pills or whatever).”
It’s just SOP. If a client is depressed, has thought about blowing their brains out, and has a gun in the nightstand it’s probably not a bad idea to suggest they put a little distance between themselves and the gun. Lock it up, give it to a friend or relative for safekeeping until things lighten up a tad, something.
I’ve done it with clients. I’ve done it friends and relatives. Hell, I called the sheriff and had my FIL taken into custody and put under a 72-hour involuntary hold when he started calling up his kids and threatening suicide with a handgun.
Everybody goes fucking ballistic if folks start asking about firearms. It’s just sound clinical practice.
I AM NOT suggesting that an individual’s right to own or purchase a firearm should be suspended just because they’re going through a rough patch. And I acknowledge there is a huge conflict when trying to treat people with mental health issues effectively and trying to keep firearms out of the hands of folks with serious mental health issues who have the potential to commit a violent act.
The bottom line is no one can know what is in the heart or the mind of another. Putting prohibitions against firearm ownership on every person seeking treatment for mental health issues is absurd. It discourages people who legitimately need some help from seeking assistance. And telling care providers they can’t ask the kinds of specific questions necessary to properly assess and evaluate a client is essentially institutionalizing substandard care, if not malpractice.
Until a person makes a specific threat against others, there’s virtually nothing that anyone can do without essentially tossing the 2nd amendment in the dumper. It sure ain’t perfect, but I don’t see any viable alternatives.
The problem is when some doctor or practice goes beyond the scope of their authority and reports the serviceman to some authority that has the ability to impact their 2A rights. Unless they’ve been adjudicated mentally deficient, they need to keep it within the realm of health care, not law. I see no reason to find fault with this policy. It’s the wannabe bureaucrat weenie that’s a problem. :mad:
They need to look at the operating environment, but won’t.
Every trigger pull gets a JAG Review, think that may be stressful?
Joe isn’t allowed to get drunk, sleep it off or blow off steam.
Look at the “Pilot’s Lounges” from Viet Nam, guys could blow steam off and not get an Art 15 (career killer these days).
The stress doesn’t end when you redeploy, all the crap “leadership” throws out is mind numbing. Make a mistake and watch your Chain of Command throw you under the bus.
Add a crappy economic situation and guys/gals are under non-stop stress.
Look at Civilian suicides, we see a rise there too, again job and economic stressers are combining to push people past their breaking points.
Exactly. We send very young men to an incredibly inhospitable place, to kill or capture humans that are barely a half rung above primates on the evolutionary ladder and expect them to be perfect angels while doing it. Stupid is as stupid does.
Montana Dave (good points) while we all agree any Veteran and any Citizen should be able to get the help they need… LEGISLATING it always seems to have a hidden agenda. They need to give the shrinks more help and create more ways of PREVENTING the problem than the Gov’t’s usual we are going to leave the problem in place and take away everyone’s rights (which usually serve some other agenda) to slap a band-aid on the wound instead of addressing the situation which created the wound. (like why are people robbing and killing? B/c the guns made me do it:eek: it wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with socio-economics problems that are addressable at the source:rolleyes:)
The shrink’s should be free from prosecution or civil suit as long as they were acting in the best interests of their patients, they should NEVER be required to report dangerous threats as you lose 1000s of those in need of help by “supposedly” safeguarding the public from a few allegedly dangerous patients. The shrink for Mr Orange Hair reported him and it was ignored, so that hasn’t proven to be reliable (this isn’t a sample of one either).
Creating a safe, trustworthy counseling environment where you do not feel the counselor is serving Big Brother’s interests first, you have no fear of being ratted out,… your family, friends and compadres are not going to be asked to spy on your behavior, your career is not going to be scarred, etc. and your health is put first… sounds to me like the place to start rather than legislation requiring being put on a bunch of watch lists and having all your sharp objects confiscated and humiliated and criminalized because you were responsible enough to seek some help.
Legislating this in the past where the shrinks were required to rat out their patients has created much of the problem. IMHO.
I recently witnessed the permanent lay off of a handful of base security, former colleagues. Two of whom were informed of their job loss less than a week prior to their redeployment over the phone. Three others are in their late mid-late fifties and will be hard-pressed to find another job, yet were not offered a severance package of any sort.
If they put the funds into making people’s lives better instead of ramming suicide prevention and resilience down their throats, I think their stats would be a lot lower.
While not in a deploying career field, having do deal with the DOD’s system for PRP related jobs gives me a lot of insight into how psychological issues are handled. Frankly, it sucks.
Nuclear alert duty is a fairly high stress job, though in a very different way from front line combat duty. We are known to have all kinds of stress related issues, many of which actually do affect job performance. But most of us will never say anything to anyone. Going to seek help from the base folks immediately gets back to your commander. They won’t know what you talked about, but they know you went and that is usually enough to restrict you from your job and affect your career. Saying anything to your peers results in the same thing (PRP culture is a very tattle-tale kind of thing).
I don’t know what the right answer is when it comes to suicide. I think it’s fine if your commander knows you have access to personal weapons and suggests that you give them to someone else for a while, but I do not support active confiscation without due process. I think a lot of people are focusing too much on the tools rather than fixing the underlying issue (who woulda thought?!?).
We should help the Veterans and Citizenry with mental healthcare issues and have a plan, but not allow Napolitano and DHS and the Dems to use it as a heart string felt fiscade in patriotic guise to further their own anti-gun agendas.
Because, you know, guns are the only lethal objects on earth, right? Nobody ever killed themselves with rope, razor blades, falls off tall buildings, driving their car into a lake, etc. :mad:
I care so much about troops with PTSD, it enrages me when it’s politicized. Create a framework to support them, back nonprofits doing so, help integrate them into civilian life, but don’t strip them of their rights and say it’s for their own good. That’s bullshit. Especially when it’s all to create an avenue to strip the rest of us of our rights.
One of the reasons servicemembers refused to seek treatment was fear of losing firearm rights. This just reinforces those concerns, and also proves the General Officer Corps is clueless
