Having affiliated with the National Guard and having heard that NG suicides are up I decided to look into the issue a bit. I've seen the Army's efforts, at least as they relate to the NG and some of the Navy's efforts as well and - neither seem serious to me. So I was curious; are my perceptions of unseriousness due to being a part of poorly led organizations or a poor organizational effort?
So I head to PBS, NPR and other new sources friendly to government and I read peer-reviewed pieces and learn that there is a lot of money involved to the tune of some $125 million, possibly more. This morning I hear on a WMAL that the Army has hired more than 90k clinicians and others to work on this problem. I don't recall seeing any big recruiting efforts but I'm not a clinician so maybe they were very carefully targeted.
Ninety thousand clinicians...where would they even find that many? Did they train them? Where are they stationed? That's more medical people treating our troops than we have troops in Afghanistan - never more than 50 or 53k at any given time. I have to track down this number but if the actual number is 10% of that it's still Nine-thousand probably more than enough to do the job right? Maybe not, if they had recruited heavily quality would have had to have been sacrificed - point in case MAJ Nidal Hassan. If we had 90k clinicians, and even half of them were armed and tossed in to support efforts in Afghanistan we'd have won six years ago before the president signaled our surrender in 2009 at his infamous West Point speech.
But I digress.
It turns out that the suicides have been miscounted somehow; each agency interminably resistant to auditing of its books also has branch-specific methods for counting the dead - at odds with the CDC method. Despite funny bookkeeping, I'm not saying it was meant to hide the true numbers or to make the problem look less significant - you draw your own conclusions, but it looks like the numbers will increase slightly in most cases. In any case, the trend line is clear - suicides of military personnel and veterans are on the uptick (year over year for last several) even as the latest annual report looks positive (pending accounting review...) for the most recent reporting period - except for the National Guard.
So, what’s wrong with the National Guard? I'm not going to speculate but I can share my own experiences with the Army's "resiliency" program part of a larger CSF or Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. This program is based on a hypothesis of a U Penn professor that was originally investigated for use with helping middle-school children improve coping skills. Now, in that original application results are mixed at best, but in the application to adults and combat stress there are some serious problems and they aren't new. I think one of the better criticisms of the program was done in 2012 by the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. In essence, they argue that the program's efficacy is overstated and there are credibility issues with the methodology, ethical problems by making participation in a psychological experiment mandatory without human subject protections, and so on. Serious stuff the Army needs to consider.
As for my own experience, the program is poorly operated. I haven't seen a clinician, indeed I can't name one that supports my training site. I've sat through many resiliency lectures given by young soldiers who are not remotely qualified to dispense prophylactic therapy with a fire hose at a group of unprepared subjects - some of whom might really need help or not require any therapy - prophylactic or otherwise. In some cases the instructors are suspicious and hostile it seems, to the training material and skip slides in the deck they don't seem to appreciate or understand and seem not to have any real grasp of the information presented. Some of them are hostile and toxic people themselves who might be creating burn out - I had one "Senior NCO" resiliency trainer - really a younger than 30, E-7 with less than ten years of service, no children - tell me that people with families shouldn't even join the guard because of the occasional familial responsibilities that conflict with training schedules.
Why is this guy lecturing about psychological health and well being? It would be comical if lives weren't at stake.
In the Navy, lecturers were similarly qualified, interested, and capable (and I let them know how I felt about it then, in writing). They were H.S. graduates, maybe with some college, usually computers, I.T. or maybe some medical training but no clinicians and they usually appeared to be seeing the material they were briefing for the very first time as they turned around, stared slack-jawed at the slides then turned around and tried to regurgitate it in some meaningful way - usually resorting to paraphrasing the slides (if you were lucky) or reading them in their entirety (poorly, if you were not lucky). I've sat through many of these suicide prevention training sessions, sometimes 2 lectures in a single drill weekend, and I've never seen - not in many years, a single qualified clinical or psych nurse or graduate social worker intern, giving this training. Why? 90k clinician hires - is that riddled with turn over? Are they being killed in combat at an alarming rate? Are they all at Ft. Hood, Bliss, and Carson? I mention Bliss because I see they have at least 6 suicides there just in April 2014.
I suspect they're counting these locally "trained" cadre of half-ass, under-qualified therapists as "clinicians" doubling down on the ethical error here. I wonder if the Army has considered laws against human experimentation that are called "Nuremberg" for a reason...
The Army needs to sit down and seriously reassess its approach and be honest about what it's doing - get serious about preventing suicide in a way that doesn't make it feel like mass punishment in formation in a way that takes limited real training time away from Soldiers, adding to their burden of stress and reducing their "resiliency", whatever that's supposed to be.
