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Your Health - Suicide and our veterans

Stuart News - 6/1/2017

Borrowed with credit to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a premier pharmaceutical and psychiatry watchdog founded by concerned psychiatrists and citizen scientists:

The United States Department of Defense announced in 2013 the startling statistic that the number of military suicides in 2012 had far exceeded the total of those killed in battle–an average of nearly one a day. A month later came an even more sobering statistic from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: veteran suicide was running at 22 a day–about 8000 a year.

Why is nobody talking about the main reason for this unacceptable tragedy? The situation became so dire that the U.S. Secretary of Defense called suicide in the military an "epidemic." The facts reveal that 85% of military suicides have not seen combat–and 52% never even deployed. This has never happened before in the history of warfare.

All evidence points in one direction: the soaring rates of psychiatric drug prescribing since 2003. Known medication side effects of these drugs such as increased aggression and suicidal thinking are reflected in similar uptrends in the rates of military domestic violence, child abuse and sex crimes, as well as self-harm. How did this situation take root?

In the face of these grim military suicide statistics, more and more money is being lavished on psychiatry and the drugs associated with suicide: the U.S.Pentagon now spends $2 billion a year on mental health alone.

The Veterans Administration's mental health budget has skyrocketed from less than $3 billion in 2007 to nearly $7 billion in 2014–all while conditions continue to worsen. Similar statistics translate to the civilian population, where insurance companies pay out for the same drugs causing the same problems.

The U.S. economy is addicted to the drugs that are addictive and harmful. How did this happen?

From 2001 to 2009, the Army's suicide rate increased more than 150% while orders for psychiatric drugs rose 76% over the same period. These soaring statistics cannot be attributed to the horrors of war, as 85% of military suicide victims had never even seen combat. Again, translate those stats to the civilian population.

"We have never drugged our troops to this extent and the current increase in suicides is not a coincidence. Why hasn't psychiatry in the military been relieved of command of Mental Health Services? In any other command position in the military, there would have been a change in leadership." - Bart Billings, Ph.D., Retired Col. and former military psychologist

I would ask, why hasn't the civilian version of the same set of circumstances been "relieved of command?" It likely comes as no surprise that our Congress has emboldened the pharmaceutical and insurance industries with favorable laws that prop them up, and are not meant for the benefit of the citizenry who elected them.

Dr. Randy Hansbrough

YourNews contributor