The Whitehouse 'idiot savant' 'W' and his right hand thug Cheney, of course!
On the grounds that the GOPee'er's can do no wrong. Even in the US black torture sites.

because it often is based on external social realities most people would rather not talk about. PTSD is just one example, but there are others. One is reminded of female hysteria, a cross-cultural problem, brought about by domestic abuse and harsh conditions. It took generations for people to talk about that issue as a social and cultural problem rather than a psychiatric one.

I don't believe that cultural change will address this tragic understanding of mental illness, however. Those in power, or who benefit from the status quo economically or psychologically, will always dismiss the victims of state policies, norms, and geopolitical shenanigans, to the category of sick or disfunctional.

In our more enlightened age, we still use Ridalin because we can't accept that school behavior is artificial. By defining mental illness as an illness rather than a reaction to external stimuli, we, as a society, absolve ourselves of blame. People know this, on a gut level they will admit it. But it's so much easier to go with drugs and the status quo, and on a level people don't want to go to, I suspect there is also the acceptance of collateral victims.

Not helping things at all, the Government's public-private partnership with Big Pharma has made the treatment (but not the cure!) of mental illness a lucrative field. Drug 'em up, bill the expense, but don't ask the hard questions.

This poor man was not sick, he was a victim.

Dr. H, rather than "whine" about his problems, Maj Hackett shot himself dead. You add insult to injury by using that shameful term.

"Whine" was a bad word choice and mischaracterizes things. Hackett didn't whine. He screwed his family, probably unwittingly, but screwed them nonetheless.

I realize this is a harsh criticism of a hero who clearly suffered from fatal survivor's guilt, but sometimes the truth sucks. Members need to take care of their retirement/discharge and proactively maneuver through it like any other mission.

Because Congress wrote the law that way. Strikes me as a bit naive that the Commandant didn't realize for the Major's family it was a legislative fix. Also surprises me no one called out Congress for writing it the way they did. The cynical part in me says not to be surprised, when did this country ever want to pay full freight for a war? Or anything else for that matter.

At least we're not Greece.

Yet.

Of course! But when your mind is swimming in agony 24 hours a day and you haven't been able to hold on to a coherent thought for more than a few minutes at a time it's not going to happen.

I can't speak to the Major's situation to know whether he had the faculties to have been proactive and made the decisions that would have protected his family. But I've seen first hand how the system treats soldiers/sailors/airmen/Marines in his very situation. Instead of treating them as patients, they are treating them as if they were themselves absent of their conditions. It's one thing for a sergeant to forget to fill out his leave papers and then be told "we're not busting our @$$ on a Friday afternoon for you to fix your mess." But when that sergeant hasn't slept in months, can't handle public spaces, and their brain is stuck refighting their war all day, not to mention his physical injuries, there's no room in their mind for what the rest of us expect a "normal" sergeant to do. Whether you call them ill, sick, injured, whatever, they are hurt. And you take care of your hurt.

At least that's what they told me once.

"no wiggle room" is a cop out and I will not excuse it as simply following the regulations. If you're a VA clerk, and you think all you do is review paperwork and check boxes, you need to be fired. A VA clerk is a social worker responsible for the well being of our veterans who have been in combat for over a decade, many with numerous back-to-back-to... deployments. Tell me they haven't seen vets masking PTSD. Tell me they haven't seen vets hiding or covering up their symptoms. If there are incidents of anxiety and sleep deprivation so severe a guy has to be MEDEVACed, then they should've at a minimum probed the case further.

I was in for 24 years and I still work with the government. There is always wiggle room, waivers, exceptions to policy, and appeals that conscientious people can apply to cases.

But alas, we don't live there.

My experience is that how well the government or the military responds to various cases depends on how much the people in the organization give a damn about the mission, not their quitting time. If the VA clerk was concerned about the mission, they'd take this case up the chain of command.

Granted, the volume of similar cases may make taking this one case up the chain of command disruptive and prevent the clerk from effectively dealing with other cases with greater merit. But then don't say "there's no wiggle room." Tell them to appeal it themselves.

as always.

Financial problems are at a root of so many social ills and illnesses. But we mustn't mention that, or if we decide to fix the problem, let's engage in lots of useless, but bureaucracy expanding activities.

Many Americans still haven't learned that there is more than one way to die due to cruelty. We, like the Brits, always focus on immediate causes of death like violence. The Brits were campaigning against slavery and suttee whilst the conditions that made possible the Irish Potato Famine were quietly gaining momentum. Likewise, the US rails against injustice abroad, and welcomes its arms to everyone, but then ignores the plight of its own poor. There is a sort of hypocritical, by-the-rules, but still very concerned cruelty to Anglo-American Whiggery.

And quickly. Irish potato famine aside, my question was: where did the $460K in debt come from? I got that the mortgage is part of it, but was it a $460K+ mortgage liability or was there something else going on here? It is rather unusual for a military member to gather that amount of liability.

The story focused on the PTSD and combat related reasons for his problems and treats the financial part of it as a distant second in the factors leading to his death. I think the topic deserved more examination. Would financial counseling or debt relief have helped this guy and his family?

What makes this so important to TOM KENNEDY? Is the idea that the Hackett family's mortgage was larger than his, and thus, improper? Or that the major was in debt due to improper expenditures -- gambling, a string of mistresses, what? Why demand these details, officiously, in public?

Some further details of the former major's circumstances come online from the USMC career planner who knew him during the closing stages of his term of service -- link below. He points out that the major's military expertise created abundant possibilities for post-military employment with law enforcement agencies. He got none, despite many job applications and instead took an unskilled civilian job and lost it apparently due to company downsizing. Possibly no law enforcement agency cared to employ a man giving clear evidence of being, well, shattered. If so, wise of them.

In service in Iraq, the career planner tells us, the major displayed symptoms of major illness that the Corps took seriously although not seriously enough to honor his request for early retirement. The Corps later came up with an assessment of his impaired medical condition at his time of retirement; the Corps has since come up with official acknowledgement that it underestimated his degree of impairment -- apparently after some months of probably expensive negotiation with the grieving Hackett family.

It doesn't seem all that hard to track down the grieving widow these days. She's probably in the phone book in her post-marital residence. Maybe she would welcome a call from TOM KENNEDY and would hustle him a copy of the family balance sheet from the time of her heroic husband's death. Maybe not. He's unlikely to get one from Best Defense resources and, of course, knows that.

The Marine career planner's memoir appears at
http://www.vamortgagecenter.com/blog/2012/02/13/remembering-major-jeffery-hackett/

...what? Not sure how the volume got turned up so quickly there. That was frothy even for an anonymous poster.

Anyway, my point was that the WaPo writer left out a lot of the financial details that might have also been a factor in what happened. The debt is presented as a flat figure without the story about how this family got there while the sources of PTSD are dissected in great detail. If there was some money involvement, it might indicate a useful tool for preventing future suicides. I read the link and still have the same questions about how it all happened.

It's odd that I have to write this, but the questions are rhetorical. No, I am not going to officiously contact his widow and demand a balance sheet.

As for my earlier comment, I am poking fun at our tendency to blow small facts up into macro applications. We went from a single suicide to Irish Potato Famine(!) in less than 100 words. It's absurd.

Nothing there worse than staggering insensitivity. Well, impertinence, too.