Saying one thing, doing another to veterans (editorial)

Saying one thing, doing another to veterans (editorial)

Posted by Mike Francis, The Oregonian April 29, 2008 02:42AM
Categories: Veterans issues
On the subject discussed here last week, I wrote an editorial on the VA's apparent effort to minimize the issue of veterans' suicides. The editorial follows after the jump.

L ast month, Department of Veteran Affairs suicide counselors fielded calls from 2,508 veterans -- the highest total for any month since the department started its suicide hot line last summer.

This statistic speaks volumes about the stress the continuing deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan is wreaking on the men and women who serve them. It's not a statistic the government wanted to face.

It emerged from a trial in San Francisco, where veterans groups are suing the department for failing to adequately address the risks of suicide. The VA argues that it cares deeply about such risks, as shown by setting up the hot line.


It's bad enough that so many vets are contemplating suicide. It's worse that the department charged with providing them with health care publicly downplays the problem.

The VA's chief told Congress in February that 144 combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan killed themselves between October 2001 and December 2005 -- a pace of roughly one suicide every 10 days. Yet internal e-mails produced at the trial showed VA officials were aware that about 18 veterans a day were killing themselves -- with roughly a quarter of them under VA care when they did.

Senate Democrats are calling for the firing of Dr. Ira Katz, the VA's mental health director, who wrote an email to VA officials saying that 12,000 veterans under VA care were attempting to kill themselves each year, and asking, "Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"

Meanwhile, Katz insisted to CBS in November, "There is no epidemic of suicide."

Katz should be fired. He's not to blame for the fact that the VA is overwhelmed, but he is to blame for minimizing the problem and putting the reputation of his agency ahead of the welfare of the men and women it was created to serve.

Further, as Sens. Tom Harkin and Russ Feingold have proposed, the VA should start tracking the suicide rate among veterans who aren't under its direct care. Right now, nobody is certain just how many veterans are so tormented that they see suicide as the best answer. Our government probably knows more about private telephone conversations between the United States and the Middle East than it knows about the health of men and women it has sent into danger around the world.

At least one measure of a war policy is the toll it takes on the people who fight, both during and after their deployments. It's unconscionable that the people responsible for their well-being are unable or unwilling to acknowledge the extent of that toll.

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