Exclusive: VA suicide hotline workers ripped for failing vets
The VA, has been swamped with calls since opening in 2007. The volume increased from fewer than 10,000 in 2007 to more than 500,000 last year, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.
A 2010 calculation by the VA estimates that 22 veterans kill themselves each day. The VA, which has not updated that estimate, says the hotline “rescues” 30 veterans from suicide each day.
Wow! The VA is swamped with calls from veterans who need help in dealing with their many issues relative to having been deployed to warzones. The report goes on to say that many VA workers are leaving their post early.
Some workers handle only one to five calls each day and leave before their shifts end even though phone lines have gotten busier, the emails say. As a result, 35% to 50% of the calls roll over to back-up centers where workers have less training to deal with the emotional problems of former service members.
So, the people who are trained to deal with potential suicides handle only one to five calls a day? For real? And after having listened to one suicidal former service member, they are out the door and oh what a great day it is, eh? Then, those who are on backup are sitting somewhere looking cross-eyed for lack of training or know-how in dealing with the ’emotional problems’ that they are hearing from the former servicemen. Go figure!
In February, an Inspector General investigation revealed that some of the in-coming calls early last year had rolled over to back-up centers and gone to voicemail.
Suicide calls of former service members went to voicemail???!!! Get the fuck outta here! They are actually saying that someone who we all ‘thank for their service to this country’ was in desperate need of some anti-suicide help and their plea for help went to voicemail? Surely, they jest?
I guess the calls went something like this!
Former service member to VA suicide hotline: “Sob! Sob! Hello! My name is John and I just cannot take the fact that I pissed on dead Afghan corpses(dead because I killed them) again and again when I was deployed in Afghanistan and now, my mind is a mess. I realize that I became a military whore for the express purpose of making warmongers ever more richer and I am just not down with that anymore. I’d rather kill myself. And I, uh……what’s that?”
VA suicide hotline voicemail: “Hello! You have reached the Department of Veterans Affairs Suicide Hotline and while we ‘thank you for your service’, your estimated wait time to speak with a suicide hotline representative is 72 hours. So, kindly hold that suicide thought and call us back when we are less busy.” Click!
Here is an idea, forward the calls to the White House! Veterans, if you are feeling suicidal, call your ex-Commander-in-Chief, Barack Insane Obama, he is the reason you are feeling suicidal, he and John McCain, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham and all the other warmongers and war hawks that insist that continuous wars lead to peace. No one should have to listen to your mental problems because you chose to sign on the dotted line to go fuck people up who had done you no personal harm. Now, even the VA is telling you to take responsibility for your own actions. The employees that are walking away from their posts early are telling you that they don’t want to hear you whine and complain about your PTSD, your night terrors and your bouts of depression. I would not want to hear them either. If you called me, I would tell you to go to hell, which is the same thing the VA is telling you to do. When they don’t answer your calls for anti-suicide help, they are telling you to stop bluffing and just ‘do yourself in’ already. They are not your priest and so therefore, have no reason in the world to want to hear your confession before you suck on a shotgun or hang yourself. You should have thought about what it would mean when someone put a loaded gun into your hands. What did you think they wanted you to do with a loaded gun? Sell it at a gun auction? You went through basic training and so you knew what was expected of you and you had every opportunity in the world to disengage yourself from the military before being shipped out to kill or be killed.
Those who you whore yourselves out to don’t give a damn about your mental disorders when you come back for if they did, do you really think that what is going down at the VA would continue to go down? Hell no! It has been stated by the head of the VA that wait times for former service members to receive necessary medical care has been likened to lines at Disneyworld and still you think that someone gives a shit about your problems? Get real! You were just expendable cannon fodder to the warmongers who were only too glad to have you get fucked up to keep the war machine revved up and when you are of no further use to anyone, including yourselves, why, the warmongers want you to just die already. They know what goes on at the VA and yet despite all hell, the VA is synonymous with outrageous wait times, indifferent medical services and unmanned suicide hotlines.
I have some advice for the former service members who are thinking of killing themselves. If this is the route that you feel you must go, then try not to take out innocent people when you kill yourselves. It is the least you could do seeing as how the predicament that you are in, lies squarely on your shoulders. And though it may seem as though I am not sympathetic to your plight, it is because I am not sympathetic to your plight because I have enough sense to know that if I pick up a weapon, that means that I intend to use it. If I don’t pick up a weapon, then I don’t intend to use it and if someone tells me to suit up and board a plane, after having put a gun into my hands, then that means that I expect to kill or to be killed and that is not something that I am willing to do. You refuse to give ‘peace’ a chance and then you wonder why you can find no peace within your own mind? When have you ever known peace and a gun to go hand in hand?
So no, I am not at all upset with the Department of Veterans Affairs for not coming through for you in your time of need because you would not be in need if you had not already lost all of your ‘humanity’ when you decided that the only way to effect peace was to launch a missile, a drone or by using a gun! Deal with the consequences of your own actions…or not!