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JOHN WHELAN

On Friday, I attended another military funeral. This service witnessed a young mother and her three young children left behind by another soldier, dead by his own hand. It is an all-too-familiar reality standing in stark contrast to the images of heroes and our recent attendance at monuments to remember and to celebrate the victories of forgotten world wars.

I know the family, even though I did not know him personally. I served in the military, have family members who still serve, and I have treated thousands of soldiers and military veterans over the past 25 years for mental injuries arising from their service. Some have died because of physical health problems, from addiction, and from suicide. The story of military veterans released because of PTSD and heading off into the unknown to face another bureaucracy is well known by now in Canada. But the reasons why soldiers and veterans take their lives remains a mystery.

In the wake of suicides, the military machinery will take over to conduct an internal checks-and-balances review to ensure that established protocols were followed. The spouse may or may not see the results of this inquiry. As expected, any information potentially troubling for the image of the Armed Forces will not be made public under the overused deference to privacy.

She will be handed off to another department, pointed to external resources to help her come to terms with grief and shock, and she will also be directed to leave military quarters within short order. It is commonly understood these days that spouses are as much a part of the military family as their partners. But her relationship with the military will end unless she makes efforts to reconnect with other military spouses in her new place of residence.

Thankfully, both sets of parents and her immediate family will circle to care for and protect her and the children, but all that she has known about the military will end abruptly.

She will wonder why the father of her children and the man she loved decided to leave them. Formal checks-and-balance inquiries will provide no answers. They never do. She will also know about the stresses and strains of her partner’s relationship with the military, but secrets told to her will never become part of official records. The public will only know that another hero died.

In recent years, a cottage industry of well-meaning but uninformed mental wellness experts have found their way into military and first responder settings in the wake of ongoing suicides. They preach the wonders of anti-stigma programs and resiliency training for soldiers and first responders, yet no evidence exists in support of these intuitive-sounding responses to suicidal tendencies. These experts rarely have any understanding of military culture: the psychological demands of training, day-to-day interactions with peers and superiors, and the secretive world of military culture. It exists beyond anything that most Canadians can imagine, even though most believe they understand this culture.

Official rationales to explain suicide continue to rely on biomedical explanations and errant brain functioning to explain depression or addiction. Other causative reasons include failures to seek care (even though many serving members are receiving medical care at the time of suicide), financial problems, or lack of community and family supports. While federal departments have triumphantly publicized sophisticated suicide prevention protocols and various wellness campaigns, no evidence for their efficacy exists, and suicides continue.

We do not explore the complexities of bureaucratic systems faced by soldiers who are threatened with medical termination of employment. Few people are aware of the devastation they face leaving the only world they understand and the uphill climb to reinvent themselves to fit within civil society.

Until we come to understand the intricate workings of military codes, belief systems, and their effects on young men and women, the issue of suicide will not abate. Keeping uncomfortable information from public scrutiny is not the answer.

John J. Whelan, PhD., R. Psych, is an adjunct professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax.