COMMENT
105 Comments | View All »
COMMENTS ARE CLOSEDBy Katrina vanden Heuvel
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
It will be a year this week since Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative activist colleagues on the Supreme Court joined together in a dramatic assault on American democracy. Their decision in the Citizens United case overturned more than a century’s worth of precedent by awarding corporations the rights of citizens with regard to electioneering. The court did away with limits on when corporations can spend on elections, how much they can spend and how they can spend their money, allowing unlimited contributions from corporate treasuries to flood the electoral landscape.
As The Nation noted in the days after the case was decided, “This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation’s most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.”
According to Bill de Blasio, New York City’s public advocate, Citizens United spending – that is, spending that was only made possible by the Court’s ruling – accounted for 15 percent of the roughly $4 billion spent on the 2010 midterm elections. Eighty-five million dollars of Citizens United money was spent on U.S. Senate races alone. Worse, 30 percent of all spending by outside groups was funded by anonymous donations, an illegal action prior to the ruling. Forty million of the dollars spent on Senate races came from sources that might never be revealed.But as striking as these consequences might be, the 2010 election was just an experiment, the first opportunity to test the new law. In future elections, corporations and shadowy organizations will have a clearer understanding of the boundaries they are operating within, a reality that is sure to translate into more undisclosed cash. And the savvier corporate players know that the mere threat of a corporate onslaught of funding for or against a candidate is enough to win legislative favor, in effect blunting prospects for sound regulation, consumer protection and fair tax policies. As former senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), himself a victim of Citizens United spending, said, “It is going to be worse in 2012 unless we do something – much worse.”
Yet even as we lament this decision, we should recognize the opportunity it presents. Justice Roberts and his allies overreached so brazenly that they have created an opening for genuine reform.
There are multiple steps that can be taken, both short-term and long-term, to roll back the corrosive impact not just of Citizens United but of preceding campaign finance cases and statutes that already had flooded the electoral landscape with special interest spending. At the more modest end of the spectrum is the option of reviving the Disclose Act or introducing similar legislation that would require corporations to show how they spend money on elections and provide disincentives to spending it. This would be a good step, but it is mere triage; if not accompanied by a broader push for a bolder set of reforms, its success would do little to curb the corporate takeover of American elections.
One potential policy change that could accompany greater disclosure would be the introduction of a public financing system, which would empower small donors. Legislation has already been introduced in Congress – the Fair Elections Now Act, which has more 160 supporters in the House. A similar system has been adopted in Arizona, and, in 2007, New York City adopted an intriguing mechanism of public finance in which the city matches small donations at a 6-1 ratio, boosting grass-roots fundraising.
The result? According to the New York Times, the changes “drastically curtailed the role of businesses, political committees and lobbyists in campaigns” and, importantly, “caused a major drop in donations from those doing business with the city.” Such a system, implemented on the national level, could greatly increase the influence of average citizens. In the post-Citizens United era, there are already efforts afoot to weaken such systems. In Arizona, for example, the Chamber of Commerce is working aggressively to overturn the state’s clean-money legislation. A push for national public financing, then, must be accompanied by a strong defense of those systems already in place.
The clearest and boldest counter to the court’s ruling would be a constitutional amendment stating unequivocally that corporations are not people and do not have the right to buy elections. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) introduced such an amendment to counter Citizens United during the last session of Congress and sees it as the only sure way to beat back the court. “Justice Brandeis got it right,” she noted last February. ” ‘We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’ ”
Campaigns for constitutional amendments demand a great deal of patience and tenacity. But as Jamie Raskin, professor of constitutional law at American University, notes, “American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy’s enemies.” Not only is a push for an amendment a worthy act, it also provides a unique opportunity to educate the broader public, raise the profile of this important issue and force elected officials to go on record as to where they stand. The campaign could create enormous pressure on state legislatures and Congress, prompting changes to campaign finance even before an amendment is ratified.
Success will require a coalition that transcends party. In this case, there is promising news. An August 2010 Survey USA poll found that 77 percent of all voters – including 70 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents – view corporate spending in elections as akin to bribery. Broad majorities favor limiting corporate control over our political lives. A coordinated effort, executed right, could unite progressives, good-government reformers and conservative libertarians in a fight to restore democracy.
The multitude of reform groups working to build a more just and democratic political system understand that if this issue is to grip people’s imaginations, it must be about more than process. In a nation where recovery still feels like recession, the suffocating grip of corporate money is anything but abstract. Mobilizing the American people to make reform a priority will demand making the clearest possible link between the rise of corporate power and the challenges of everyday lives.
That’s not a tough pitch.
In just the past two years, corporate money can be blamed for watering down consumer protections and diluting health-care and financial reform. In truth, there is almost no conversation we have in American politics in which corporations don’t occupy all the seats at the table. As Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged while talking about big banks during last year’s financial reform debate: “They frankly own the place.”
Changing that dynamic might well be the central challenge of this generation. Reversing Citizens United is about more than any one issue or court case – it is, at its base, a question of whether American democracy itself can beat back a corporate takeover, whether our most cherished principles of self-government can ultimately prevail.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.
105 Comments | View All »
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
It will be a year this week since Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative activist colleagues on the Supreme Court joined together in a dramatic assault on American democracy. Their decision in the Citizens United case overturned more than a century’s worth of precedent by awarding corporations the rights of citizens with regard to electioneering. The court did away with limits on when corporations can spend on elections, how much they can spend and how they can spend their money, allowing unlimited contributions from corporate treasuries to flood the electoral landscape.
As The Nation noted in the days after the case was decided, “This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation’s most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.”
According to Bill de Blasio, New York City’s public advocate, Citizens United spending – that is, spending that was only made possible by the Court’s ruling – accounted for 15 percent of the roughly $4 billion spent on the 2010 midterm elections. Eighty-five million dollars of Citizens United money was spent on U.S. Senate races alone. Worse, 30 percent of all spending by outside groups was funded by anonymous donations, an illegal action prior to the ruling. Forty million of the dollars spent on Senate races came from sources that might never be revealed.
Yet even as we lament this decision, we should recognize the opportunity it presents. Justice Roberts and his allies overreached so brazenly that they have created an opening for genuine reform.
There are multiple steps that can be taken, both short-term and long-term, to roll back the corrosive impact not just of Citizens United but of preceding campaign finance cases and statutes that already had flooded the electoral landscape with special interest spending. At the more modest end of the spectrum is the option of reviving the Disclose Act or introducing similar legislation that would require corporations to show how they spend money on elections and provide disincentives to spending it. This would be a good step, but it is mere triage; if not accompanied by a broader push for a bolder set of reforms, its success would do little to curb the corporate takeover of American elections.
One potential policy change that could accompany greater disclosure would be the introduction of a public financing system, which would empower small donors. Legislation has already been introduced in Congress – the Fair Elections Now Act, which has more 160 supporters in the House. A similar system has been adopted in Arizona, and, in 2007, New York City adopted an intriguing mechanism of public finance in which the city matches small donations at a 6-1 ratio, boosting grass-roots fundraising.
The result? According to the New York Times, the changes “drastically curtailed the role of businesses, political committees and lobbyists in campaigns” and, importantly, “caused a major drop in donations from those doing business with the city.” Such a system, implemented on the national level, could greatly increase the influence of average citizens. In the post-Citizens United era, there are already efforts afoot to weaken such systems. In Arizona, for example, the Chamber of Commerce is working aggressively to overturn the state’s clean-money legislation. A push for national public financing, then, must be accompanied by a strong defense of those systems already in place.
The clearest and boldest counter to the court’s ruling would be a constitutional amendment stating unequivocally that corporations are not people and do not have the right to buy elections. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) introduced such an amendment to counter Citizens United during the last session of Congress and sees it as the only sure way to beat back the court. “Justice Brandeis got it right,” she noted last February. ” ‘We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’ ”
Campaigns for constitutional amendments demand a great deal of patience and tenacity. But as Jamie Raskin, professor of constitutional law at American University, notes, “American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy’s enemies.” Not only is a push for an amendment a worthy act, it also provides a unique opportunity to educate the broader public, raise the profile of this important issue and force elected officials to go on record as to where they stand. The campaign could create enormous pressure on state legislatures and Congress, prompting changes to campaign finance even before an amendment is ratified.
Success will require a coalition that transcends party. In this case, there is promising news. An August 2010 Survey USA poll found that 77 percent of all voters – including 70 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents – view corporate spending in elections as akin to bribery. Broad majorities favor limiting corporate control over our political lives. A coordinated effort, executed right, could unite progressives, good-government reformers and conservative libertarians in a fight to restore democracy.
The multitude of reform groups working to build a more just and democratic political system understand that if this issue is to grip people’s imaginations, it must be about more than process. In a nation where recovery still feels like recession, the suffocating grip of corporate money is anything but abstract. Mobilizing the American people to make reform a priority will demand making the clearest possible link between the rise of corporate power and the challenges of everyday lives.
That’s not a tough pitch.
In just the past two years, corporate money can be blamed for watering down consumer protections and diluting health-care and financial reform. In truth, there is almost no conversation we have in American politics in which corporations don’t occupy all the seats at the table. As Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged while talking about big banks during last year’s financial reform debate: “They frankly own the place.”
Changing that dynamic might well be the central challenge of this generation. Reversing Citizens United is about more than any one issue or court case – it is, at its base, a question of whether American democracy itself can beat back a corporate takeover, whether our most cherished principles of self-government can ultimately prevail.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.
In the Presence of My Enemy: A Reflection on War and Forgiveness
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/in_the_presence_of_my_enemy_a_reflection_20110120/
Posted on Jan 20, 2011
By Ron KovicThou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. (Psalms 23:5)
As this, the 43rd anniversary of my wounding in Vietnam approaches, and I once again try to find meaning in that day and the days which were to follow, my thoughts return to the northern bank of the Cua Viet River on Jan. 20, 1968. It is a day that will change my life forever.
I am medevaced from the battlefield to the intensive care ward in Da Nang, Vietnam. For the next several days I struggle with everything inside me to live. The dead and dying are everywhere. I am in and out of morphine every four hours. I awaken to the screams of the wounded all around me—young men like myself, 19, 20-year-olds. I am told by a doctor that I will never walk again, that I will be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
Still I am grateful to be alive, to still be breathing. I dream of my hometown, of my mother, my father and my backyard where I had played as a boy. All I want to do now is survive, to get out of this place somehow and return home. I completely lose track of time; I don’t know if it is day or night. They keep bringing in the wounded and carting out the dead.
It is the eve of the Tet offensive. A young Vietnamese man who has been severely wounded is brought into the intensive care ward. I can still remember that day clearly—his face, the fear in his eyes. One of the nurses tells me that he is a Viet Cong soldier who had been shot in the chest only a few days before. I look into his eyes as he is carefully placed in his bed directly across from me. “He’s the enemy, the Viet Cong, the ‘Gook,’ the Communist,” I think to myself, “the one my country sent me to fight and kill. The one I must fear, the one I must hate, the man who is not even human.”
That belief and hatred had been reinforced in Marine Corp boot camp, at Parris Island, S.C., where we had chanted, “I’m going to go to Vietnam. I’m going to kill the Viet Cong!” Perhaps he was the one who had pulled the trigger a few days before, trying to kill me, the one who had shot and paralyzed me from my mid-chest down for the rest of my life. I will never know for sure. Yet as I lie in that hospital bed and our eyes meet, I feel no hatred or animosity toward him. On the contrary, I feel compassion for this man I had been taught to hate, this man who is my enemy.
Each day upon awakening from the morphine I look at him and he looks back at me, our eyes meeting, our gaze a recognition of each other’s presence, our humanity, an understanding that both our worlds have been turned upside down and we are now in a far different place than we had been only a few days before. We reach an equality of sorts in this place of the wounded and dying, that great leveler, where distinctions vanish, where there is no prejudice or hatred, where all becomes equal. We are two wounded young men in late January of 1968 simply trying to survive, two human beings who only want to live.
A sort of unique bond begins to develop between my “enemy” and myself over the next several days, a strange and at first somewhat uneasy camaraderie without words, which is both unsettling and at the same time seems completely natural to me. I do not think of him as my enemy anymore. I begin to care about him more and each time I awaken from the morphine, and with the screams of the wounded and dying all around me, I reach out to him with my eyes, with my heart, as he lies across from me in his bed. I now want him to live just as much as I want to live.
“Keep fighting,” I think as I watch him trying to communicate. We are together in this now, and none of those other things seem to matter anymore. “If you don’t give up I won’t give up,” I think, pressing my lips together, reaching out to him, one human being to another, no longer enemies—two young men struggling to live and go home, leave all of this sorrow behind, back to our families, our homes and our towns where it was simple again, where it was safe.
The days and nights and hours pass. The lights are always on and I never know if it is night or day, and after a while it doesn’t really matter anymore. I awake one day and look across and see the empty hospital bed. He is gone, and the nurse tells me he has died. There is no emotion in her voice. She is very tired, and there will be many more dead and many more wounded before it is all over. I stare at his empty bed for a long time, feeling a sadness I could not fully comprehend.
In the years that have passed, I have often thought about those days on the intensive care ward and about that young Vietnamese man, my “enemy,” who lay in that hospital bed across from me, and how we are all perhaps much closer to each other as brothers and sisters on this Earth than we realize. Despite all our differences, there is, I believe, a powerful connectedness to our humanity—a deep desire to reach out with kindness, with love and great caring toward each other, even to our supposed enemies, and to bring forth “the better angels of our nature”—that is undeniable and cannot be extinguished, even in death.
This, I believe, is the hope of the world. This is the faith we now need in these times.
In the years that followed, I would attempt to write about the war and about that long and often difficult journey home, trying to give meaning to what I and so many others had gone through. There would be other profound moments of reconciliation and forgiveness to come, but almost always my mind would drift back to that young Vietnamese man who laid across from me for those few brief days on the Da Nang intensive care ward in 1968.
As this, the 43rd anniversary of my wounding in Vietnam approaches, and I once again try to find meaning in that day and the days which were to follow, my thoughts return to the northern bank of the Cua Viet River on Jan. 20, 1968. It is a day that will change my life forever.
I am medevaced from the battlefield to the intensive care ward in Da Nang, Vietnam. For the next several days I struggle with everything inside me to live. The dead and dying are everywhere. I am in and out of morphine every four hours. I awaken to the screams of the wounded all around me—young men like myself, 19, 20-year-olds. I am told by a doctor that I will never walk again, that I will be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
Still I am grateful to be alive, to still be breathing. I dream of my hometown, of my mother, my father and my backyard where I had played as a boy. All I want to do now is survive, to get out of this place somehow and return home. I completely lose track of time; I don’t know if it is day or night. They keep bringing in the wounded and carting out the dead.
It is the eve of the Tet offensive. A young Vietnamese man who has been severely wounded is brought into the intensive care ward. I can still remember that day clearly—his face, the fear in his eyes. One of the nurses tells me that he is a Viet Cong soldier who had been shot in the chest only a few days before. I look into his eyes as he is carefully placed in his bed directly across from me. “He’s the enemy, the Viet Cong, the ‘Gook,’ the Communist,” I think to myself, “the one my country sent me to fight and kill. The one I must fear, the one I must hate, the man who is not even human.”
That belief and hatred had been reinforced in Marine Corp boot camp, at Parris Island, S.C., where we had chanted, “I’m going to go to Vietnam. I’m going to kill the Viet Cong!” Perhaps he was the one who had pulled the trigger a few days before, trying to kill me, the one who had shot and paralyzed me from my mid-chest down for the rest of my life. I will never know for sure. Yet as I lie in that hospital bed and our eyes meet, I feel no hatred or animosity toward him. On the contrary, I feel compassion for this man I had been taught to hate, this man who is my enemy.
Each day upon awakening from the morphine I look at him and he looks back at me, our eyes meeting, our gaze a recognition of each other’s presence, our humanity, an understanding that both our worlds have been turned upside down and we are now in a far different place than we had been only a few days before. We reach an equality of sorts in this place of the wounded and dying, that great leveler, where distinctions vanish, where there is no prejudice or hatred, where all becomes equal. We are two wounded young men in late January of 1968 simply trying to survive, two human beings who only want to live.
A sort of unique bond begins to develop between my “enemy” and myself over the next several days, a strange and at first somewhat uneasy camaraderie without words, which is both unsettling and at the same time seems completely natural to me. I do not think of him as my enemy anymore. I begin to care about him more and each time I awaken from the morphine, and with the screams of the wounded and dying all around me, I reach out to him with my eyes, with my heart, as he lies across from me in his bed. I now want him to live just as much as I want to live.
“Keep fighting,” I think as I watch him trying to communicate. We are together in this now, and none of those other things seem to matter anymore. “If you don’t give up I won’t give up,” I think, pressing my lips together, reaching out to him, one human being to another, no longer enemies—two young men struggling to live and go home, leave all of this sorrow behind, back to our families, our homes and our towns where it was simple again, where it was safe.
The days and nights and hours pass. The lights are always on and I never know if it is night or day, and after a while it doesn’t really matter anymore. I awake one day and look across and see the empty hospital bed. He is gone, and the nurse tells me he has died. There is no emotion in her voice. She is very tired, and there will be many more dead and many more wounded before it is all over. I stare at his empty bed for a long time, feeling a sadness I could not fully comprehend.
In the years that have passed, I have often thought about those days on the intensive care ward and about that young Vietnamese man, my “enemy,” who lay in that hospital bed across from me, and how we are all perhaps much closer to each other as brothers and sisters on this Earth than we realize. Despite all our differences, there is, I believe, a powerful connectedness to our humanity—a deep desire to reach out with kindness, with love and great caring toward each other, even to our supposed enemies, and to bring forth “the better angels of our nature”—that is undeniable and cannot be extinguished, even in death.
This, I believe, is the hope of the world. This is the faith we now need in these times.
In the years that followed, I would attempt to write about the war and about that long and often difficult journey home, trying to give meaning to what I and so many others had gone through. There would be other profound moments of reconciliation and forgiveness to come, but almost always my mind would drift back to that young Vietnamese man who laid across from me for those few brief days on the Da Nang intensive care ward in 1968.
Suicide in the Army
WASHINGTON (Jan. 19, 2011, Army News Service) -- The Army vice chief of staff reported a slight reduction this past year in suicides committed by Soldiers on active duty, from 162 in 2009 to 156 in 2010.
"While we achieved modest success in reducing the number of suicides of these Soldiers on active duty," said Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, "we saw a significant increase in the number of suicides of Soldiers not serving on active duty, to include a doubling in the Army National Guard."
In 2009, the number of Guard and Reserve Soldiers who committed suicide while not serving on active duty was 80. In 2010, that number nearly doubled to 145.
"In 2010, we've got two obvious questions: first of all what happened and second, we have to be able to respond and tell people what we are doing about it," Maj. Gen. Ray Carpenter, acting director of the Army National Guard, said.
According to Carpenter, the analysis for 2010 shows that it's not a deployment problem, because more than 50 percent of the people who committed suicide in the Army National Guard had never deployed. It's not a problem of employment, because only about 15 percent of the people who committed suicide in fact were without a job.
"As you look at it, part of it is a significant relationship problem, because over 50 percent of those who committed suicide had some sort of a partner problem that they were dealing with whether it was marriage, divorce, or boyfriend, girlfriend, that kind of thing. Our effort is to build resiliency in Soldiers," Carpenter said.
To help understand the factors involved with suicide, the Army has partnered with the National Institute of Mental Health on a program called Army STARRS.
Army STARRS, the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers, was officially launched in late 2008.
Over the course of the five-year study, to run through 2014, and by working with up to 400,000 Soldiers, NIMH and the rest of the research team - including the Uniformed Services University of the Health Services, University of Michigan, Harvard University and Columbia University - hope to identify the risk and protective factors that affect a Soldier's psychological resilience, mental health, and potential for self-harm.
"When you realize that we're taking a young American in the Army today, psychologists will tell you, in six years in the U.S. Army under the OPTEMPO that we're on right now, we're putting them under as much stress in a six-year period as they would have if they lived to be 80 years old in Seattle, Washington, and whatever they did there," Chiarelli said.
Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of Army Health Promotion, Risk Reduction Task Force, said in an earlier release that research and analysis of the suicide cases of this past year continue to reinforce that there are no universal solutions to address the complexities of personal, social and behavioral health issues that lead to suicide within the Army.
"The positive thing I see is that some of our programs are beginning to work, but more important than anything else, our leaders are fully engaged with this problem right now. We're getting at the stigma issue, we're getting people the help that they need and I hope you're going to see these numbers go down significantly in the coming year," Chiarelli said.
Suicide is the fourth-leading cause of death among 25- to 44-year old people in the United States. Historically, the suicide rate has been lower in the military than among civilians. In 2008 that pattern was reversed, with the suicide rate in the Army exceeding the age-adjusted rate in the civilian population (20.2 out of 100,000 vs. 19.2).
While the stresses of the current wars, including long and repeated deployments and post-traumatic stress, are important potential contributors for research to address, experts point out that suicidal behavior is a complex phenomenon.
The study will examine a wide range of factors related to and independent of military service, including unit cohesion, exposure to combat-related trauma, personal and economic stresses, family history, childhood adversity and abuse, and overall mental health.
"I really believe when we put more time between deployments that is going to be a huge factor in helping get at a lot of these problems," Chiarelli said. "I really believe that dwell is one of the things we have to look at, and has an impact on all kinds of problems, not just suicides, but you know, all the things that fall short of suicide from relationship issues to drug and alcohol abuse, to high-risk behavior, to all those things. The more time we can get between deployments, the better off we'll be."
"While we achieved modest success in reducing the number of suicides of these Soldiers on active duty," said Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, "we saw a significant increase in the number of suicides of Soldiers not serving on active duty, to include a doubling in the Army National Guard."
In 2009, the number of Guard and Reserve Soldiers who committed suicide while not serving on active duty was 80. In 2010, that number nearly doubled to 145.
"In 2010, we've got two obvious questions: first of all what happened and second, we have to be able to respond and tell people what we are doing about it," Maj. Gen. Ray Carpenter, acting director of the Army National Guard, said.
According to Carpenter, the analysis for 2010 shows that it's not a deployment problem, because more than 50 percent of the people who committed suicide in the Army National Guard had never deployed. It's not a problem of employment, because only about 15 percent of the people who committed suicide in fact were without a job.
"As you look at it, part of it is a significant relationship problem, because over 50 percent of those who committed suicide had some sort of a partner problem that they were dealing with whether it was marriage, divorce, or boyfriend, girlfriend, that kind of thing. Our effort is to build resiliency in Soldiers," Carpenter said.
To help understand the factors involved with suicide, the Army has partnered with the National Institute of Mental Health on a program called Army STARRS.
Army STARRS, the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers, was officially launched in late 2008.
Over the course of the five-year study, to run through 2014, and by working with up to 400,000 Soldiers, NIMH and the rest of the research team - including the Uniformed Services University of the Health Services, University of Michigan, Harvard University and Columbia University - hope to identify the risk and protective factors that affect a Soldier's psychological resilience, mental health, and potential for self-harm.
"When you realize that we're taking a young American in the Army today, psychologists will tell you, in six years in the U.S. Army under the OPTEMPO that we're on right now, we're putting them under as much stress in a six-year period as they would have if they lived to be 80 years old in Seattle, Washington, and whatever they did there," Chiarelli said.
Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of Army Health Promotion, Risk Reduction Task Force, said in an earlier release that research and analysis of the suicide cases of this past year continue to reinforce that there are no universal solutions to address the complexities of personal, social and behavioral health issues that lead to suicide within the Army.
"The positive thing I see is that some of our programs are beginning to work, but more important than anything else, our leaders are fully engaged with this problem right now. We're getting at the stigma issue, we're getting people the help that they need and I hope you're going to see these numbers go down significantly in the coming year," Chiarelli said.
Suicide is the fourth-leading cause of death among 25- to 44-year old people in the United States. Historically, the suicide rate has been lower in the military than among civilians. In 2008 that pattern was reversed, with the suicide rate in the Army exceeding the age-adjusted rate in the civilian population (20.2 out of 100,000 vs. 19.2).
While the stresses of the current wars, including long and repeated deployments and post-traumatic stress, are important potential contributors for research to address, experts point out that suicidal behavior is a complex phenomenon.
The study will examine a wide range of factors related to and independent of military service, including unit cohesion, exposure to combat-related trauma, personal and economic stresses, family history, childhood adversity and abuse, and overall mental health.
"I really believe when we put more time between deployments that is going to be a huge factor in helping get at a lot of these problems," Chiarelli said. "I really believe that dwell is one of the things we have to look at, and has an impact on all kinds of problems, not just suicides, but you know, all the things that fall short of suicide from relationship issues to drug and alcohol abuse, to high-risk behavior, to all those things. The more time we can get between deployments, the better off we'll be."
No comments:
Post a Comment