Ending Veteran Suicide

The first in a series of articles on solutions that save lives, in partnership with Mission Veteran Possible.

The best way to reduce the risk of suicide for an individual? It’s not a surprise. It just seems like an impossible task sometimes.

The task is: Help them feel better. Do something that works.

The best way to not kill yourself? It’s by not wanting to kill yourself. People who don’t want to kill themselves rarely die by suicide.

Forty-four veterans kill themselves every day. This is unconscionable. But knowing hope exists is a necessary first step to having hope.

Oral medications aren’t the answer, for the most part. Or, at least we don’t know how much of the answer they might be. The reason for this is that zero currently available oral antidepressant medications have been studied in randomized controlled trials to treat suicidal individuals.

That statement is not a typo, or a mistake. It is a shocking but accurate statement.

We have one randomized controlled trial of an oral psychiatric medication, the medication clozapine, in which it was used in individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaf…