At the end of last summer, photographer Devin Mitchell started traveling around the United States documenting the diverse lives of veterans through semi-surreal portraits for his senior thesis project.

"It's an intimate experience every time," Mitchell told BuzzFeed News. "Sometimes people will make me dinner, sometimes I'll spend time meeting their parents, sitting in their kitchens, talking with them about life."

He would connect with the vets, go into their homes, and let them choose their props, costumes, poses, and who would be featured with them in the photos, the newest of which depict life with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

As he continued to produce the images, Mitchell said he realized how therapeutic the process of taking these photographs was for the community. He called the series the Veteran Vision Project.

"There are two sides to this series," Mitchell said. "It spreads awareness about the veteran community, the challenges they face during reintegration into society. But it also works as a therapy for the subjects. ... It makes visible what they feel."

"From the beginning of the project, it was my mission to let veterans say whatever they want through my photographs," Mitchell told BuzzFeed News. "Many people who do projects on veterans only want to take a particular angle. I want to explore all of the issues, all of the darkness."

After taking thousands of portraits of veterans in their daily lives , the 27-year-old photographer was approached by a veteran to do a series on military suicide and sexual trauma. BuzzFeed News is the first to feature this series.

Military sexual trauma (MST) and suicidal tendencies among military actives and veterans are found to be strongly linked.

An annual study on military sexual assault by the U.S. military recently found that approximately 26,000 men and women are sexually assaulted in the armed forces. About 86% of these go unreported.

In 2014, a study was released demonstrating that approximately 20 U.S. veterans commit suicide every day, or about one every 80 minutes. Many of the photos address this statistic.

In 2014 the Department of Veteran's Affairs found that more than 7,400 veterans committed suicide, about 18% of all suicides in the US, Military Times reported. This is a small improvement from the highly-cited 22 suicides a day reported in 2012.

"I think I can safely say that every person in the military has been affected by suicide," Mitchell said. "Whether it's something they've tried, or considered, or has impacted someone close to them."