Hearing on Vet Suicides

CBS News reports on a congressional hearing titled, "The truth about veteran suicides."

There is talk of a "cover up" within the VA over veteran suicide data. A congressional committee is looking into the matter.

Internal emails by Dr. Ira Katz, the VA's head of Mental Health, seem to have landed the VA in hot water. In a email to his top media adviser Katz says, "Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities."

Katz's e-mail was written shortly after the VA provided public data showing there were only 790 attempted suicides in all 2007.

Katz later said, "There is no epidemic in suicide in VA."

Sarabeth of 1115.org has no sympathy for Katz:

Why address the problem, and try to reduce the number of actual suicide attempts, when it’s so much easier to just perform a radical numerectomy on the official statistics? Especially when you can achieve much more dramatic results by number-fudging than you ever could through providing adequate mental health services.

This guy is surely the perfect combination of criminal negligence and criminally stupidity? What kind of mental defective do you have to be to a) think you can get away with claiming that attempted suicides are 15 times lower than they actually are, and b) to openly put it all in writing in an email like that?

-Dippold

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