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Panel hears VA, critics on suicides

The father of a veteran who committed suicide teed off on the Department of Veterans Affairs at a congressional hearing Thursday, calling the VA’s mental health system “broken.”

“The VA mental health system is broken in function, and understaffed in operation,” Mike Bowman told the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “There are many cases of soldiers coming to the VA for help and being turned away or misdiagnosed for [post-traumatic stress disorder] and then losing their battle with their demons.”

His son, Spc. Timothy Noble Bowman, killed himself on Thanksgiving Day, 2005, eight months after returning from Iraq with his Illinois National Guard unit. He was 23.

“If the veteran suicide rate is not classified as an epidemic that needs immediate and drastic attention, then the American fighting soldier needs someone in Washington who thinks it is,” said Bowman.

According to the VA’s preliminary evaluation of suicide rates among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 144 known suicides from the beginning of the war through the end of 2005, said Dr. Ira Katz, VA deputy chief of patient care services for mental health.

“This number translates into a rate that is not statistically different from the rate for age, sex and race matched with individuals from the general population,” he said.

But Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., the committee chairman, referred to a recent CBS News report that found the rate of suicide among veterans is double that of the general population.

“Suicide can be a very difficult public health crisis to gauge,” he said. “I am more troubled by a lack of response from the VA than I am at not having perfect statistics. We need to hear from the VA what this agency needs in order to reach out to all veterans.”

Since the VA implemented a suicide prevention hotline in July, more than 6,000 calls from veterans or families have come in. Among those, more than 1,300 were referred to suicide prevention coordinators in VA medical centers, and more than 300 were “rescues,” Katz said.

But Filner criticized VA for not providing information on follow-ups with those who had called the hotline, and for not following up on allegations of troops who had come to the VA for help and been turned away.

Katz said the VA is in the midst of a major program to expand overall mental health services.

Seeking help frowned upon

Bowman said significant stigma for seeking mental health care still exists in the military. “Mental health issues are a natural part of combat, but we identify it as a problem,” he said.

His son’s old unit is going to Afghanistan in the spring, and the troops don’t want to have any information about counseling on their records, said Bowman, who still keeps in close touch with many of his son’s comrades.

Some are seeking private counseling, driving as much as 100 miles to get it, he said.

He said education should be mandatory for families, with information on how to recognize both normal behaviors and signs of problems. Family members of troops in his son’s unit got a 10-minute briefing on post-traumatic stress disorder two months before the soldiers returned, and the soldiers got even less, he said.

Bowman said when his son got off the bus with the other troops returning from Iraq, he was a different man. “He had … a thousand-yard stare, always looking for an insurgent,” he said.

Looking back, Bowman said, small signs of trouble were evident. For example, when the war came up in discussion, Tim would find a way to change the subject or leave the room.

“We didn’t know what to look for,” Mike Bowman said.

Tim didn’t realize what was happening to him, said his mother, Kim, who sat next to her husband with her hand pressed against his back as he testified.

She said VA needs to include all service members in some sort of program that brings them and their families back together for education and discussion, so that all involved can learn to recognize problems.

As far as they know, there is no VA help for them, as parents of a deceased service member, though their son’s battalion commander tried to find a program that they would qualify for.

“As far as families, I’ve never seen a VA person approach,” Bowman said. He and his wife sought private counseling.

“I now suffer from the same mental illnesses that claimed my son’s life, PTSD, from the images and sounds of finding him and hearing his life fade away, and depression from a loss that I would not wish on anyone,” he said.

Author Penny Coleman said family members often blame themselves for the suicide of the veteran. For decades after her husband killed himself after returning from Vietnam, she said, “I believed his death was my fault, and I crept into a psychic lair to hide my shame and lick my wounds in private.

“I married again and had two children, but it was an awful way to live, tip-toeing around everybody I loved, trying not to kill one of them by mistake.”

As a result of her research for her book, “Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War,” she has a number of recommendations, including dropping “disorder” from the descriptor. The military should also stop deploying troops who are psychically injured, and there should be a structure for screening troops and veterans outside the chain of command, she said.

Mike Bowman wants action. “I want some organization to jump up and say, ‘Veteran suicide is an epidemic and we want to do something about it,’ ” he said. “Grab the ball and run with it. It’s time.”

“It’s past time,” added Kim Bowman.