How many Australian soldiers would have to be murdered to spark national talk of a crisis? Five? Ten? If a single serving member of defence personnel was killed by a terrorist, do we really think it would escape the front page news?

We’d know, because we’re a caring nation, aren’t we? We plant flowers by the roadsides of accidents, we mark national tragedies with legacy mountains of gifts, and more flowers, and cards.

But since the beginning of the year, 14 veterans of service in Australian armed forces are reported to have taken their own lives, a number most Australians may be shocked to learn. This figure’s in addition to the 78 reported to have taken their lives just last year – “reported”, because the morbid numbers are tallied by veterans groups from sources in person and from Facebook, counting lives lost among old colleagues, family members and friends. Suicide has killed more than four times as many soldiers than those lost in combat since 1999, yet it barely registers in the national consciousness of a country that had a royal commission to investigate four deaths resulting from the poor installation of pink batts.

There’s presently a Senate inquiry into veteran suicide, and it’s just had its submission dates expanded. It’s received over 300 submissions, and they are harrowing reading. Numerous shared experiences inform the individual circumstances of the deaths. Post-service unemployment. Financial problems. Relationship breakdown. Injuries and medical issues. Extreme frustration with the institutional rigidity of Department of Veterans’ Affairs processes, present and historical. They’re problems, of course, that do not perish with the dead; they are the daily afflictions of the living.

Loretta Somerville is one: ex-navy, and the survivor of a suicide attempt. In 1991, she was serving when she was sexually assaulted off-base by a group that included two of her colleagues. Trauma, injuries and a historical process that obliged her to continue serving in the same community as the men who raped her drove her out of the navy – her career – with lifelong consequences. In 2015, she overdosed. “It’s not so much about ending life,” she said to me, “as it is about ending that pain.”

Stuart McCarthy is another who lives in the consequences of his service. His career as an army engineer saw his active service in Bougainville, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq and two tours of Afghanistan in 2011. It also saw him given an experimental drug, tefanoquine, an early cousin of the infamous anti-malarial drug mefloquine. McCarthy’s return to civilian life came with family and financial stresses amid the effects of what’s since been diagnosed as a “chemically acquired brain injury”. I encountered him for the first time on Facebook, offering to sell his service medals for help affording specialist treatment.

He’s since withdrawn the medals from sale, but he can’t retreat from his frustration with a post-service “veterans affairs” system that speaks to good intentions but delivers a confusing array of obstacles and inadequate resourcing. “I’m an army officer of 28 years,” he tells me of his problems negotiating the complexities of DVA support, “if this can happen to me, I can see how it happens to much more junior people. And it happens again and again and again. We’re not getting the help that we need.”

David Jamieson, the National President of the Defence Force Welfare Association, understands the concerns; his is one of 24 veterans organisations who met in Canberra last week to collaborate more closely. “The government aren’t trying to do the wrong thing,” he tells me “but they’re not flipping listening. We’re spending a lot of money, but the rate of suicide is not reducing.”

Jamieson’s issue is one you hear across a range of Australian communities, from Indigenous groups to family violence advocates. “The government are spending $150m for veterans’ mental health issues,” he tells me – but the money stays at the top, “while on the ground, we have small groups of people with no resources or backing trying to help each other, and often they’re getting better results.”

Jamieson’s next remark sounds very familiar: “They listen far too much to their political advisers and departmental advisers – these people are professional and well-meaning but they’re too removed from the coalface ... This sense of remoteness is keenly felt by people in the community. I don’t know if the government realises its role in actually governing.”

It’s a sense of remoteness is borne out when parliament does things like its decision to allow the government to release the personal information of veterans to the media – Centrelink-style – “should it wish to correct public statements”. It’s been vehemently opposed by veterans activists, and Labor, at least, is now publicly rethinking its position before it heads to the Senate. Yet not one member of the lower house – independent or in any party – resisted the passage of the original vote.

You can’t help but conclude it’s because veterans and defence personnel occupy an nearly invisible political space in Australia. Traditionally, the right takes its votes for granted and the left doesn’t challenge it when it does. Those struggling to understand the electoral survival of Jacqui Lambie in the upper house should consider her genuine rarity among politicians, as someone willing to dedicate consistent activism, rather than platitudes, towards Australia’s returned veteran community.

Retired colonel and veteran activist Ray Martin shares the frustration felt by so many, especially in the shadow of such slow progress on policy responses to urgent situations, like suicide: “The conservatives think we vote for them, so they take us for granted,” says Martin. “Labor thinks we vote conservative, so to a degree they think it’s not worth it.”

But Martin insists that the service performed by the defence force demonstrates a diversity and complexity that goes unregarded. “A good defence force reflects its society – and our defence force is very good, with a lot of respect overseas,” he explains. “They’re good soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen, but they’re also compassionate, and known for their empathy.”

But their empathy doesn’t appear returned to them by society at large. Australians, whether right or left, rarely challenge the notion of defence service beyond embracing or rejecting the simplistic wrapping of flags, slouch hats, symbols, pins and platitudes, jingoistic TV drama and the affected, uncomfortable use of words like “mateship”, “Aussie”, “digger”, “Anzac”.

What’s underneath the props and costumes, of course, are human beings – some who come home, prosper and thrive, and some with bad fortune, who return to suffering and pain. And, like any citizens who suffer, they deserve more from the structures supposed to support them. So much more.

In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.

