McCain says because he survived 5½ years of brutal torture, while a prisoner of the communist Vietnamese, he is better qualified to be president of the United States than any other candidate. McCain claims his POW sufferings included three years in solitary confinement where he was tortured so badly that he "broke," causing him to attempt suicide.

(Disclaimer: I am NOT a Scientologist, I think it's a repressive, fraudulent cult. Disliking some aspects of modern psychiatry does NOT mean I have any love for Scientology.)

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/...

I don't normally read the health blogs very much, but seeing this story made me click, though I know I probably shouldn't have for how pissed off I became after reading it.

Suicide is a very personal issue for me. I've had suicidal friends, and I would be lying to say it hasn't crossed my mind at times. I'm also a part of something where one of the most influential people involved at one point (it could be argued that he co-created visual kei) died of a tragic accident that people to this day hastily write off as intentional suicide.

And it it my opinion that the psychiatric response to suicide and narrative of what it means to be suicidal is thoroughly inadequate. . .

Does Hot Topic selling products for To Write Love On Her Arms dilute the message of hope and recovery?  

There is a very coordinated push to leak details about the late Bruce Ivins to certify that he is the "lone nut" anthrax killer, details which don't entirely hold up upon scrutiny.  There's definitely a desire on the part of the government to make this an open and shut case seven years after the fact, but it doesn't completely hold together.  In fact, the media reports are almost all contradictory.

An exploration on the flip...

America is down on itself, for sure.  Eighty percent of us think that America is on the wrong track, and the other twenty percent thinks that there’s something wrong with the eighty percent.  We don’t like ourselves or each other very much.

Today the new lead suspect on the Anthrax mailings was found dead, apparently by suicide:

The FBI's lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks -- Bruce E. Ivins -- died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide.. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at.. Ft. Detrick, Maryland Glenn Grenwald

Just 3 weeks ago, Patrick Leahy and Mukasey had a very curious talk about the dismissal of another leading suspect, as documented by emptywheel:

Call me crazy. But after viewing this very creepy exchange between Patrick Leahy and Michael Mukasey regarding the anthrax killer, I got the feeling that both of them know exactly who sent those anthrax-laden letters almost seven years ago......Leahy makes a curious statement: we're paying Hatfill, which means that the guy who committed the crime is going free. Emptywheel

Atrios & Glenn Greenwald reminds us that Richard Cohen had been warned at the time  and Glenn  reminds us of a botched attempt to blame IRAQ in the Anthrax mailings.. (see below)

Update: I guess I'm not quite as jaded by the Bush Administration as many commenters.  Personally, I find it quite believable that this guy was a right-wing nutcase; and given that Dick Cheney himself was terrified by the anthrax attacks, I doubt very much the anthrax attacks were directly perpetrated by the Administration.  But I'm no expert on this, just the bearer of the news.

UPDATE 2: Glenn Greenwald has changed my mind.  This article today is truly explosive.  This is an extraordinary scandal--and if it goes any higher than one or two people at the lab, it could be the item that forever discredits the neocons and lands a bunch of people in jail--or worse.  We're talking treason, terrorism and attempted murder here.

Actually the number is probably higher - 22,000 identified themselves explicitly as vets.  Over 55,000 called the special line set up through the VA in its first year of operation.  Some are friends and family of vets, which makes sense, as watching someone close struggle with PTSD or worse must be unbearable.  These statistics are gruesome.

Calls to the VA’s hotline more than doubled this calendar year going from a total of about 21,000 in January to more than 55,000 by the end of June, averaging about 250 calls a day.

over...

Last week, I shared a tragic story of a veteran who committed suicide less than three hours after being assessed as a "low risk" patient, and was released from VA care. The carelessness of his assessment was largely due to a standardized questionnaire that was used to identify high risk patients. This is a serious oversight, especially when you consider the statistic that by the end of the day, 18 veterans will have taken their own lives.

Since these troops make it home from Iraq, Afghanistan or other battlefields alive, they are not counted as casualties of war. In 2007, 6,256 veterans committed suicide. That's about two thousand more than the number of troops who died in Iraq since the beginning of the war. And yet, these deaths are not counted among the war casualties.

By Donna Smith, American SiCKO,
Communications specialist, California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee

Tomorrow I'll have my third colonoscopy.  Twice before, precancerous polyps have been found and removed, so my schedule for testing is every three years.  That three years goes by way too fast.  I know the screenings are life-saving for many, but I still hate them.  And my hatred goes well beyond my dislike of the preps necessary.  

As a uterine cancer survivor and an insured American who was financially devastated after illness, my cancer checks are always fraught with a bit of trepidation and a lot of projecting.  

But private, for-profit insurance leaves me exposed -- and worse still, it leaves millions and millions of unsuspecting insureds wide open to financial ruin.  On the eve of my screening, this is what I think about.

What if I have cancer again?  What if the insurance doesn't pay for something? And then beyond... What if I miss work?  What if we have to move again?  What if the bills pile up?

The Boston Globe reports today on the tragic case of Carlene Balderrama, a middle-class homeowner in Taunton, MA.  At 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon, just two and half hours before the scheduled foreclosure of her family home -- where she lived with her husband and adult son -- Mrs. Balderrama faxed a note to her mortgage company.  The note said "by the time they foreclosed on the house today she'd be dead."

For some reason, police did not get to the house until 3:30, and sure enough they found Balderrama's body.  She had shot herself with her husband's high-powered rifle.

More on the flip.

Some stories just shock you enough to have to mention something about them, to think they're more indicative of something than the singular tragedy for one family.  What I just read on Boston.com is one of those stories.

A 53 year old woman, a wife and mother, from Taunton, Massachusetts, faxed her mortgage company at 2:30 PM yesterday saying before the 5 PM auction of her home began she would be dead.  When the company received the fax they called police within an hour.  When the police got to the home, she was already dead, 1 1/2 hours before the auction would have started.

http://www.boston.com/...
(more)

A day after the Spokane Spokesman-Review highlighted a surge in vet suicides in her state -- and focused on the most recent case where the victim was denied full help by the V.A. -- Sen. Patty Murray will speak out on this issue (which I have long written about) in a major floor speech on the Hill later this afternoon.

The press release from her office notes that she is doing it "to raise awareness of the continuing problem of veterans struggling to get the mental health care they need and the epidemic of veterans suicides....
Although, Senator Murray will acknowledge that the VA is taking some helpful steps to address suicides including running advertisements highlighting their 24-hour suicide prevention hotline, Murray will call for more to be done. In her speech, Senator Murray will call for an increase in resources to boost outreach, breakdown barriers to care, and ensure that veterans are not turned away when they seek mental health care at VA facilities."

Yesterday's Spokesman-Review piece was a real shocker.

Today, I had a very odd search.  Now, you do know that site meter does tell me what you are searching for when you find my Uniongal blog site.

You see a company in New York search for

can I fire someone who threatens to kill himself

So, you must be wondering how in the hell anyone found uniongal from this search, well, it’s because I blogged about Wesley N. Higdon, 25.

Who’s Wesley N Higdon? He’s the reason there are 6 dead in Kentucky

   I'm writing this diary because the other day I wrote a comment in a diary here and was shocked by the intensity of what I posted. (It wasn't rude or anything, I copied it below the fold.) Then today I read the Op-Ed that's listed below and the two seemed to fit together.
    For what it's worth, surviving a suicide is something no one should ever experience.
 

The overall physician suicide rate cited by most studies has been between 28 and 40 per 100,000, compared with the overall rate in the general population of 12.3 per 100,000.[1

These statistics are old. It is very difficult to get an acurate number, because most studies get "cause of death" from death certificates. They are known to markedly under report suicides.

The military has finally, after nine months, announced the results of its probe into the death by gunshot of a gay soldier in Afghanistan, who was engaged to marry her partner in Massachusetts, last fall but her family doesn't seem to be buying it.

The military's handling of the case has been disturbing from the outset, with claims of murder voiced by friends and family due to the fact that the victim was known to be gay and had written home that she had seen some troubling things that might cause her not to survive.

Officials first reported that Ciara Durkin, 30, of Quincy, Mass., who served in the National Guard, had died "in action," then revealed that she was killed in a "noncombat" incident that was being investigated.

32,000 Vets To Be Warned About Suicide-Linked Drug

ABC News/Washington Times Investigation Leads To Action

32,000 to be notified? 32,000 Veterans, how many are probably suffering from PTSD/Depression already, apparently are in this program unearthed by ABC News and the Washington Times, 32,000!

Responding to an ABC News/Washington Times investigation, the Veterans Administration plans to inform 32,000 veterans that they are using a drug linked to suicide or violent behavior.

And we already know where the administration stood on this from the previous reports:

The Bush White House had initially defended the VA's handling of the Chantix experiment.

Brought back to light in this one.

.
PTSD PLUS ANTI-SMOKING DRUG EQUALS 41 SUICIDES

McBUSH VA KNEW DRUG WAS LINKED TO SUICIDE

Veterans Administration Never Told Test Subjects Drug Might Cause Suicide

Just when you think George "Dubya" Bush couldn't possibly sink any lower, you read this. Your tax dollars are being used by your government to experiment on soldiers who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, formerly known as Combat Fatigue, previously called Shell-Shock.

[Crossposted at Out Of Iraq Bloggers Caucus]

MORE after the Jump
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