1115.org

Thomas Insel is director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. A brave man, evidently. Or foolhardy, or about to retire, or he just doesn’t care about his job any more for some reason. He has come out with a startling assessment of just how badly the Bush administration has dropped the ball when it comes to veteran suicides:

The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government’s top psychiatric researcher said.
[...]
Insel echoed a Rand Corporation study published last month that found about 20 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post- traumatic stress disorder or depression, and only half of them receive treatment. About 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought in the two wars since October 2001, the report said. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site.

Based on those figures and established suicide rates for similar patients who commonly develop substance abuse and other complications of post-traumatic stress disorder, “it’s quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,’” Insel said.

Perhaps Insel’s assessment shouldn’t be regarded as so startling, after all? Remember how the Bush administration’s efforts to combat veteran suicides seem to have focused on shutting their eyes to the problem, and just lying about the number of suicide attempts (and suicides) among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans?

Two weeks ago, CBS News reported that Dr. Ira Katz, head of Mental Health in the Department of Veterans Affairs, had been caught red-handed lying about the number of suicide attempts among veterans.

In November, Katz told a CBS News reporter: “There is no epidemic in suicide in VA.”

But in this e-mail to his top media adviser, written two months ago, Katz appears to be saying something very different, stating: “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities.”

Katz’s e-mail was written shortly after the VA provided CBS News data showing there were only 790 attempted suicides in all 2007 – a fraction of Katz’s estimate.

“This 12,000 attempted suicides per year shows clearly, without a doubt, that there is an epidemic of suicide among veterans,” said Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense.

And it appears that Katz went out of his way to conceal these numbers.

First, he titled his e-mail: “Not for the CBS News Interview Request.”

He opened it with “Shh!” – as in keep it quiet – before ending with
“Is this something we should (carefully) address … before someone stumbles on it?”

Why address the problem, and try to reduce the number of actual suicide attempts, when it’s so much easier to just perform a radical numerectomy on the official statistics? Especially when you can achieve much more dramatic results by number-fudging than you ever could through providing adequate mental health services.

This guy is surely the perfect combination of criminal negligence and criminally stupidity? What kind of mental defective do you have to be to a) think you can get away with claiming that attempted suicides are 15 times lower than they actually are, and b) to openly put it all in writing in an email like that?

And this guy has still not been fired. Only in George Bush’s administration!