Guest column by Nick Buchta | The forgotten battlefield

W e’ve lost 22 soldiers today , but not on a conventional battlefield. Instead, that is the number of United States Military veterans that Veterans Affairs es timates die by suicide every day. Spread across an entire year, that equates to roughly 8,000 deaths annually — to put that into perspective, 6,639 servicemen and women have died in combat in the entire 13-year duration of the Wars on Terror.

It is important to note that it is not just recently deployed veterans who are suffering. A Harvard Law School study found that about 430 recently returned veterans committed suicide between 2001 and 2005 — just over 10 percent of all US military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan in that period. At the same time, the VA reports that about 70 percent of veteran suicides occur at the age of 50 or older. It is not enough to look at the effects of combat and post-traumatic stress disorder in the immediate aftermath of being deployed. This is a problem that warrants an examination of the long-term effects of combat, something that Congress has thus far failed to address.

In 2007, the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act was introduced to help give the VA tools for education, research and treatment for veterans’ mental health issues, but failed to make it out of committee in the senate. A later compromise led to the passage of similar legislation but removed language that would have allowed VA hospitals to track veterans who had come in for treatment but failed to continue with it. The Dignified Treatmen t of Wounded Warriors Act of 2007 and Veterans Mental Health Outreach and Access Act of 2007 both strove to further empower the VA, but focused only on ve terans of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This past summer also saw public outrage after problems within the VA were made public, culminating in the resignation of then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. The massive failures of VA hospitals around the country to deliver adequate care underscored the fact that more must be done to care for our veterans of all wars. The Veterans’ Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act of 2014, passed in response to the VA scandal, addresses mental health only three times — none in the context of improving suicide prevention services — and fails to mention suicide at all.

At Penn, students and faculty have rightfully spoken out over the last year and a half to promote mental health and prevent the loss of more friends and loved ones. But just as much as we need to come together as a community at Penn, we must realize that we are also part of a bigger community. It is not enough for us to work to create change only within our own bubble.

Fortunately, Penn is full of people willing to speak out against injustices and political decisions we don ’t see eye to eye with. Too often, however, we overlook the human element of some of these larger political debates.

We celebrate both those who came home and those who did not on Veterans Day but do not seem to pay much attention to those who are still suffering. I think today gives us an opportunity to not just talk about this issue, but to act. We can’t just speak about suicide at Penn; we must address it on a larger scale.

I can’t say that I have the ultimate solution or the best way to act, and I am in no way saying that we should overlook the effect that suicide is having outside of the military. But we are in some ways responsible for putting these men and women into the situations that have made PTSD a household term. At the very least, we need to start talking about this. We are a university full of stu dents who not only have a voice but also know how to use it. It seems to me that this is as good a time as any to do so.

If you or someone you know are dealing with mental health problems, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or reach out to the CAPS office here at Penn (215-898-7021).

Nick Buchta is a College sophomore from Olmsted Township, Ohio, studying communication in public service and philosophy, politics and economics. He is an associate copy editor at The Daily Pennsylvanian. His email address is nbuchta@sas.upenn.edu. 

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