To watch the full exchange beween Amanda Souza and President Obama, scroll to the bottom of this story.
President Obama held a town hall meeting at Fort Lee, Va. on Wednesday. In it, he fielded an absolutely gut-wrenching question from Amanda Souza. Souza is both mother to and widow of military veterans.
She’s a widow because her career military husband could no longer deal with the stress of living with post-traumatic stress disorder and took his own life. She wants to know what’s being done to stem the tide of more than 20 veterans who kill themselves each day.
As of today, the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance has recorded 84 known suicides this year — that breaks down to 70 firefighters and 24 EMS providers. And because those numbers come from voluntary reporting, there have most likely been far more firefighter suicides this year.
But this is nothing new to us in the fire service. We’ve been wrestling this demon for a long time. And so too has the military, as this search on our sister site Military1 shows.
President Obama told Souza about the increased investment the military has made in addressing PTSD, including hiring more clinicians and even embedding some with troops to help during or soon after incidents rather than waiting until the vets return home.
More importantly, he told her that he’s ordered all commanders to ensure their charges know that seeking help for mental health issues is no more a sign of weakness than it is to seek help for a physical injury like a broken leg. And he acknowledged that those orders will take time to work their way through the military culture — something we too are quite familiar with.
What struck me most was when he stopped his answer to urge veterans watching to call the VA if they need help. And he urged loved ones to make that call if the veteran in need wouldn’t do so.
I’m grateful to Souza for bringing this issue up on a national stage; you can tell it was difficult for her.
It’s my hope that efforts to destigmatize, better understand and better fund treatment resources for mental health issues in the military makes it easier to do the same in the fire service. I’m hoping the military’s rising tide raises the fire service boat with it.
One of the more promising advances may come in the form of resiliency training. Fire Chief Andrew Baxter of the Charlottesville (Va.) Fire Department gave a brief presentation last month at the National Fire Academy on his research into this method of teaching firefighters how to bounce back from traumatic incidents.
While researchers understand that individuals’ level of psychological resiliency differs and that it is a learned skill, more work needs to be done in this field.
Chief Baxter said he’d like to see more work to measure firefighters’ resiliency, to examine possible links between psychological resiliency and physical conditions like cancer and heart disease and to develop training that builds resiliency in firefighters.
How much of a bump is felt in the fire service from the military’s increased focus on mental health is anyone’s guess. But the exchange on national television between Souza and President Obama is another step toward the ultimate goal of ending solider and first responder suicides.
For those reading this who need help or know someone who does, here are three places to turn.
