Llewellyn King: Some veterans' suicides are linked to minute brain tears
Arizona Army and Air National Guard members participating in "Ruck for Life," an event promoting military suicide prevention.
World War II Memorial in the Fenway section of Boston.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
This is a horror story.
It is a story of suffering unmitigated and of death from despair. It is the story of our veterans who are 57 percent more likely to take their own lives than those who haven’t served their country.
Every day in the United States an average 17 veterans commit suicide. Those who have served in special combat force units, such as the Navy Seals, being a little more likely to die this way than regular forces.
These veterans are suffering and dying in plain sight. Veterans, whether they have seen action or not, are ending life by their own hands — hands that willingly took up arms to serve.
There is a clear and present crisis in deaths of those who have borne the battle, heard their country’s call and who die, often alone in despair.
Around Veterans Day we remember them, but what do we know of them?
More veterans have taken their own lives in the past 10 years than died in the Vietnam War. Frank Larkin, chairman of Warrior Call, an organization that asks anyone who knows a veteran to call them from time to time and ask, “How are you doing? What do you need? Can I get help for you?” But mostly to convey the comfort of knowing that “You are not alone.”
However, the problems are beyond loneliness and the well-known precursors to suicide: drug abuse, alcoholism, joblessness and broken relationships.
New research shows that what ails these sad heroes isn’t just psychological and moral despair, but physical brain damage -- minute tears in the brain that CT scans don’t pick up.
A leading researcher into brain injury and concussion, Dr. Brian Edlow, a professor at Harvard and associate director of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery at Massachusetts General Hospital, said these tears are only discovered in postmortems, when the brain tissue is put under a powerful microscope.
The cause of these tears, Edlow told guest host Adam Clayton Powell III in a special Veterans Day episode of the television program White House Chronicle, are blasts that troops experience on the battlefield and in training — massive concussive blasts, over and over again. Those concerned emphasize that the victim doesn’t have to see combat to suffer damage, it happens in training as well.
Sometimes the tears are the result of a head injury such as a soldier’s head hitting the inside of a tank or a blast throwing a soldier against a wall, but mostly it is the shockwave, according to Edlow.
“Just to appreciate the scope of this problem, if you look at the post-9/11 generation, those who answered the call to serve after September 11, 2001, over 30,000 active-duty and veteran military personnel have died by suicide during that time period, which is four times more than the number of active-duty personnel who died in combat,” he said, adding that the “extent of the suicide problem is humbling.”
Larkin said that as many as two-thirds of those who commit suicide have never been to a VA hospital or sought institutional help.
For Larkin, the story is very personal. His son Ryan, a decorated Navy Seal who served for 10 years with four active-duty deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, was a suicide.
Ryan returned from active duty a changed young man, 29 years old. He was moody, didn’t smile and showed classic signs of depression. His family couldn’t get him out of it and his brain scans were negative. After a year, he took his own life.
Earlier, Ryan had asked that his body be used for medical research. Postmortem diagnosis at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center revealed substantial brain damage that wasn’t detectable during the year before his death, his father said.
“The system didn’t know what to do and it defaulted toward psychiatric diagnosis,” Larkin said.
Referring to scans and other techniques now in use to examine the brain, Edlow said, “We simply are not accurate enough to detect these sub-concussive blast-related injuries.”
Ryan’s tragedy is repeated 17 times every day — and that figure doesn't account for those who die in deliberate accidents and are otherwise not reported as suicide, Larkin said.
While medical science and the military catch up, all we can do, as Larkin said, is to check on a veteran, any veteran. You could save a life, bring a man or woman back from the precipice.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.,
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
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