Listen First Today [Memorial Day]
It’s Memorial Day, and as someone who spent most of my life suffering from chronic anxiety and depression, I can’t help but to think about all the people who died during service, and after they left the battlefield, due to untreated, but totally treatable, brain aka mental health conditions.
Suicide and drug overdoses are two of the biggest killers of enlisted soldiers and veterans. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Suicide Prevention,
~1 soldier dies from suicide every three days
~20 veterans die from suicide every day
Jason Roncoroni, a lieutenant colonel who founded a suicide-prevention organization after his retirement from the Army in 2015, attributes the military’s suicide rate to the stress generated by a sense among soldiers that current American wars will never end, and the expectation of endless future deployments.
“We’ve blurred the line between peacetime and wartime,” Roncoroni told The Trace’s Ben Hattem in 2017. “So you have this heightened sense of anticipation of what’s to come, which exists as a cloud of anxiety that follows you around.”
Do you have a sense that your current personal war will never end?
That it’s just a future of endless cycles of the same mad/sadness?
That the lines between work, life, self, caretaker, partner are so blurred that you’re always on guard, on watch for something to happen so you can react perfectly...and yet life is foggy?
You deserve peace of mind - and a life you enjoy. And so does everyone in our lives--soldiers, veterans, protesters alike.
Together, by being open and breaking down stigma, we can prevent the 90% of suicides that occur from treatable brain conditions - like depression, bipolar and addiction.