A Suicide Averted

The Defense and the Veterans Affairs departments offer a wide range of tools to help soldiers and veterans on the brink of suicide, including counseling centers and 800 number help lines.

But people with problems don't fit into tidy boxes, as I found out the day before Christmas when I talked with a friend in the Army's Pentagon press shop. He had just received an e-mail from an Army National Guard Iraq veteran who had found my friend's name in a news article about suicides. The veteran told him she was suicidal. He asked her to call him every day until he found her the help she needed, and last Friday she entered a 90-day treatment program at a VA hospital.

What's the lesson here as we confront increasingly dismal suicide statistics by veterans and active duty troops? Simple, maybe we all have a role to play in helping those we have sent into harms way. That means asking them about combat stress, what they are doing about it, and whether they need help -- and then guiding them to find help.

It also means having a warm and sympathetic heart, which my Army PA friend has, and a realization that suicide prevention is something handled not by a bureaucracy, but people helping each other.