Suicide Causes More Death Than Car Accidents.

In June, the NY Times published an article stating that "the suicide rate among the nation’s active-duty military personnel has spiked this year, eclipsing the number of troops dying in battle and on pace to set a record annual high since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan more than a decade ago." . Well, it appears the suicide epidemic is not confined to the military.

A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that suicide causes more death than car crashes.  That's right, while the rate of car crashes continues to decline, the rate of suicide has increased dramatically making it the leading cause of injury deaths in America. 

I guess it should come as no surprise as statistics show that suicide rates increase in times of economic trouble, and despite what the media tells you, the only recovery going on is the banks and corporations recovering more and more of our money.

Deaths from car accidents decreased 25%  while deaths from poisoning rose 125%, deaths from falls rose 71% , and deaths from suicides rose 15%. Moreover, the author of the study, Ian R. H. Rockett, PhD, MPH, believes suicides are "terribly undercounted" and that the official data on suicide may be off by as much as  20%.

"Suicides are terribly undercounted; I think the problem is much worse than official data would lead us to believe. There may be 20 percent or more unrecognized suicides. Many of the poisoning deaths may actually be intended. A lot of these deaths are due from overdoses of prescription drugs." --Ian R. H. Rockett

The last decade has seen not only the national rate increased, but the global rate as well.

"Conclusions. Mortality rates for suicide, poisoning, and falls rose substantially over the past decade. Suicide has surpassed motor vehicle traffic crashes as the leading cause of injury mortality. Comprehensive traffic safety measures have successfully reduced the national motor vehicle traffic crash mortality rate. Similar efforts will be required to diminish the burden of other injury. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print September 20, 2012: e1-e9. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2012.300960)

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More Soldiers Dying From Suicide than Combat.

Suicides are sky-rocketing among the 1.4 million active-duty military personnel , averaging one per day since the beginning of 2012, the fastest pace in the nation's decade of war. That's not counting all the soldiers who have come home. Once they are discharged, they immediately begin falling through the cracks, so much so that it’s doubtful there are any accurate numbers on suicide rates among veterans of recent wars. One thing we do know is that the numbers are very high.

The 154 suicides for active-duty troops in the first 155 days of the year far outdistance the U.S. forces killed in action in Afghanistan — about 50 percent more — according to Pentagon statistics obtained by The Associated Press.The 154 suicides for active-duty troops in the first 155 days of 2012 far outnumber U.S. forces killed in action in Afghanistan — about 50 percent more — according to Pentagon statistics obtained by The Associated Press.

Kim Ruocco, widow of Marine Maj. John Ruocco, a helicopter pilot who hanged himself in 2005 between Iraq deployments, said he was unable to bring himself to go for help.

"He was so afraid of how people would view him once he went for help," she said in an interview at her home in suburban Boston. "He thought that people would think he was weak, that people would think he was just trying to get out of redeploying or trying to get out of service, or that he just couldn't hack it - when, in reality, he was sick. He had suffered injury in combat and he had also suffered from depression and let it go untreated for years. And because of that, he's dead today."

One man responded to the article:

I was very moved by this article. Being a soldier who was made a example after I reported I was having problems and suicidal. The military has not changed since my discharge 20 years ago.Recently I was forced to use the military confidential line and was first hung up on, then put on hold, and finally told to call back Monday. This was a crisis line. To my horror after obtaining a copy of my medical records for treatment and services outside the VA medical system. There was a note by my doctor saying I made a call and was "Babbleing". I have still not been seen nor helped with this problem(s).That General lied, and the VA doesnt care. Just pick up the phone and call the confidential number. I cannot explain the cost of my reporting being suicidal as a active duty soldier. But it ruined my life. If your in the service your best off doing it and dont live as I am and have been.Thank you for this article and getting the word out. I will be more than happy to share my medical records publicly for any doubters.

Is it any wonder that so many take their lives after they find out they're fighting a global war for corporate plunder by those who profit from death and destruction?

War Is A Racket - Smedley Butler, 1935

Who Pays The Bills?

[T]he soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement -- the young boys couldn't stand it.

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Lobotomizing the Human Race.

Proposed revisions to the diagnostic “bible” of mental health disorders - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Edition V (DSM-V) - in 2013, may classify grieving/bereavement, shyness and defiance as mental illness. In other words, the pathologization of conditions which used to be considered in the normal spectrum of human behavior occurs every time a revised or new DSM is released.

Don't be fooled. DSM is big business. Increasing the number of disorders gives psychiatrists greater latitude in prescribing even more drugs, thereby increasing the bottom line for Big Pharma. The bottom line is they want us running to our ever-increasing medicine cabinet every single time we feel something...anything. Can you say, zombie? Because that's obviously what our rulers desire in the long run.


Coalition for DSM-5 Reform

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Why the Irish Hate Cats.

Oweynagat: Home of the psychotic cats.
Most of my ancestry -- just short of 100% -- can be traced back to the land most commonly associated with leprechauns and fairies. Although very proud of my heritage, I've always felt the Irish are/were more susceptible to mental "illness" than any other ethnicity. My suspicions, based solely on speculation, may originate from the more than a few colorful characters that dot the branches of my genealogical /ancestral tree, past and present.

Patrick Tracey confirms those suspicions in his book Stalking Irish Madness Searching for the Roots of My Family's Schizophrenia.

There are a couple of different explanations for "Irish Madness". The first one is located in County Roscommon's beautiful lush green valley, in the cave, Oweynagat, better known to the Irish as "Cave of the Cats" or "Ireland's entrance to Hell". Ancient folklore tells tales of a cave that possess the minds of the insane. Beings from hell emerge from this cave, oftentimes as cats, and wither away anything they came into contact. Those touched by these psychotic cats are/were carried "away with the fairies" thus offering the first explanation as to why, up until the 1960s, Ireland had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness in the world.

Although not as enchanting as the tale of psychotic cats, Patrick Tracey offers another explanation...what he calls the three-legged stool, a trifecta of factors that include famine, alcoholism, and advanced age of paternity. In 1850, the "three-legged stool" stood firm in Irish culture when the Irish filled asylums on both sides of the Atlantic.

Although, watered down in the last 150 years, there is no doubt an elevated level of "lunacy" still circulates throughout the blood of the Irish. However, this "curse" of what appears to be instability masks a rich assortment of blessings.

Firstly, let's take a look at the "stable" American or stereotypical WASP family. For all practical purposes they do appear "stable". Everyone maintains the status quo. Calm, level-heads prevail. No one dares to do anything to upset the apple cart. Appearances and etiquette rule. "Love" is dependent on whether you "deserve" it or not. Not a bad thing, if you happen to be created from a one-shape fits all cookie-cutter.

On the other hand, the Irish, all too familiar with our own demons, realize that none of us "deserve" love, and because of that fact, paradoxically, we all deserve love. Conditions are not ours to place. Is this true of all the Irish? Of course not, however, just as the "Cave of Cats" provided the Irish with a way to evaluate, and interpret insanity...through affliction and hard times, the concept of unconditional love has provided the Irish with a way to evaluate and interpret humanity -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

In the words of a man who was tending the tombstones.

“The thing about the Irish,” he said, “is that we have always been there for the little guy. We go through life as underdogs. We die as underdogs. There is no other way for the Irish.”

Unless you're Bill O'Reilly, of course.

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What do Gecko Band Aids Have to do with Mental Health Care, Child Soldiers and the Third World?

Just as two beings must intertwine in order to produce another complete being, physical and mental health must intertwine in order to produce a healthy state of wellbeing. The exclusion of one type of health care - physical or mental - is detrimental to type of care.

Although, it may be true physical health issues are usually more urgent and life threatening, the overall health of the individual cannot be maintained without both. Poor mental health can affect everything in society from the labor force, economic infrastructure and crime rate to the quality of life and interpersonal relationships.

Good health care of any kind is expensive and hard to obtain among the poor all around the globe. In the United States, with almost half of our population uninsured or under-insured, health care, although conducive to pleasure and comfort, is obviously considered by many as inessential. And as for mental health care? Even less essential as mental health parity has a long way to go. Federal law still allows insurers to discriminate between physical and mental illness by allowing them to set higher co-payments and/or stricter limits on mental health benefits.

Bearing in mind the richest country in the world, "US", is just starting to emerge from the dark ages regarding mental health, it is "reasonable" to assume mental health care is non-existent in the third world. The West African country of Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, has one psychiatrist per five million people...so; yes, mental health care is, for all practical purposes, non-existent in third world countries.

Back to the third world countries. Nearly eighty percent of all fighters in Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war were aged seven to fourteen. These children were kidnapped, forced into the fighting and made to perpetuate the worst atrocities imaginable. They were typically provided with mind-altering drugs. Some were forced to snort a mixture of cocaine and gun powder to lower inhibitions against violent behavior and firearms in order to carry out the mission of their soulless leaders.

In Uganda, Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) rebel leader Joseph Kony kept child soldiers in line by forcing cannibalism on them, forcing them to kill each other, kill the weakest in the group, using them as mine detectors and amputating limbs.

Many of these children were forced to go back into their villages to amputate the limbs of family members so that they would not be allowed back into their family, to ensure they would remain outcasts.

"The rebels told me to join them, but I said no, then they killed my smaller brother. I changed my mind." a child soldier quoted in Peter Singer's book Children at War

How can a country begin to rebuild with so many of its citizens shaped and socialized in what can only be called, Hell? A brutal environment, completely devoid of humanity, where young, innocent, obedient, trustful, beings with limited understanding, easily indoctrinated, play both the role of perpetrator and victim.

When I was child. I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. --1. Cor. xii. 11.

What do these children do when they become "men"? What kind of mental health care could possibly erase the deeply embedded scars "permanently" etched on the soul and psyche of each one? The task seems insurmountable, like using a box of "Dora the Explorer" or "Sponge Bob" band aids to close a person up after open heart surgery.

Currently, the one psychiatrist administering to five-million people and the few people that are given one day of mental health training are equivalent to applying the "Dora the Explorer" band aids in surgery or to cover a bullet hole, in other words, totally useless. However, upgrading from "Dora the Explorer" to let's say, Gecko ultra sticky "internal band-aids" with glue that coats the underlying structure designed to stick to living tissue might just be doable.

Dr. Suzan Song is a psychiatrist working with the Harvard School of Public Health to deliver mental health care to these adolescents in Sierra Leone.

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Laughter is Contagious

Laughter is truly contagious, and now, scientists studying how our brain responds to emotive sounds believe they understand why.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London have shown that positive sounds such as laughter or a triumphant "woo hoo!" trigger a response in the listener's brain. This response occurs in the area of the brain that is activated when we smile, as though preparing our facial muscles to laugh. The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, Action Medical Research and the Barnwood House Trust, is published today in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Led by Dr Sophie Scott, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, the research team played a series of sounds to volunteers while measuring their brain's response using an fMRI scanner. Some of the sounds were positive, such as laughter or triumph, while others were unpleasant, such as screaming or retching. All of the sounds triggered a response in the volunteer's brain in the premotor cortical region, which prepares the muscles in the face to respond accordingly, though the response was greater for positive sounds, suggesting that these were more contagious than negative sounds. The researchers believe this explains why we respond to laughter or cheering with an involuntary smile.

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