HUFFINGTON
09.22.13
INVISIBLE CASUALTIES
think of all the gifts he left us, Leslie and Jayden and the whole family. We are very close.”
Don is now a peer mentor coordinator with TAPS, training other
suicide survivors to approach newly
bereaved family members to offer a
friendly ear and other resources.
“The best thing for those who
have lost a loved one to suicide —
and for the rest of us — is to talk
about suicide, he said. “Give it
some attention. We have to get rid
of the stigma of PTSD, depression,
substance abuse. We have to talk
about it or we’re not going to be
able to fix it.”
“A lot of us [suicide survivors]
get stuck in our shame,” he said. “I
just met a couple whose son died
six years ago and they have never
been able to talk about it. But
talking about it helps people who
struggle with the shame, and if you
don’t deal with that, the shame
will eat you up.”
He also learned how to move on.
“I will always miss my son and love
him, but I don’t want his death to
define my life,” he said.
He began to understand that he
would never comprehend precisely
why Joshua took his life. That
he couldn’t play what-if: what if
Joshua’s Navy buddies had been
around, what if his drug use had
been detected earlier, what if his
mother had not died...
“I don’t think the military should
be blamed completely,” he said. But
he did allow that “there were things
the military could have done to
help make it less traumatic for guys
coming back and trying to get back
into civilian society.”
“They spend a lot of time to train
them to be mentally and physically
tough. But we don’t do anything to
reprogram them back. The training
is making them tougher and tougher. But how do we train
them to be soft again?”
David Wood is the senior military
correspondent at The Huffington Post
and the winner of a 2012 Pulitzer Prize
in National Reporting for his series,
“Beyond the Battlefield.”
David Wood
appears on
HuffPost Live
to explain
the “Invisible
Casualties”
series.
Tap here
to watch
the full
interview.