by Russ Scala

I was never in battle, but working emergency scenes as a paramedic attached to a SWAT team put me in many positions I would like to forget. I never used drugs, but did drink way too much as a way to deal with death. I was a lieutenant and was definitely not going to talk to a counselor—that was for wussies. I was bullet proof—or so I thought. Honestly, if I had to go through what soldiers do now, I’d probably have ended up very bad off, if not dead.

When you read the paper it’s sad to see the high suicide rate among military personnel. Since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the suicide rate has sometimes exceeded one soldier per day. In just one month, July of 2011, there were 32 suspected suicides. Twenty-two were on active duty and ten were reservists. In one report, 36 percent of all soldiers who killed themselves had never been deployed.

Of course, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had stressors that did not exist in other wars: back-to-back deployments, long periods away from families, and no designated front line. Both these wars were the first to include a generation of men and women who grew up on psychoactive drugs like medication for ADHD and bipolarity and who were prescribed or permitted drugs in the war zone. Most of these drugs have black box warnings that include suicide, so isn’t a stretch to see why they are committing suicide at such alarming rates.

These drugs didn’t exist during other wars, nor did the Dark Practice of Polypharmacy, loading one drug on top of another in an experimental cocktail until something worked. Psychiatrists don’t use blood tests or advanced brain imaging. They guess and then slap you with a label they can treat with drugs—which is decidedly NOT biology.