completely senseless

This is a public service announcement: Suicidal thoughts are a Life-threatening condition. Like chest pains they are ignored at the risk of the person experiencing them DYING. It is not something you can “snap out of” or just get over. You cannot treat yourself or your loved one.

If this soldier had presented at the VA with chest pains he would have been admitted, even if they didn’t have a bed on the cardiac unit. This soldier did what he could to reach out for help and was turned away.

The whole situation makes me more angry because he is a casualty of this war that didn’t have to happen. His parents, after hearing him mourn and grieve for his own experience with death, now have to mourn and grieve more death.

It’s just unbelievable.

This Marine’s death came after he served in Iraq
Kevin Giles, Star Tribune

At first, Jonathan Schulze tried to live with the nightmares and the grief he brought home from Iraq. He was a tough kid from central Minnesota, and more than that, a U.S. Marine to the core.

Yet his moods when he returned home told another story. He sobbed on his parents’ couch as he told them how fellow Marines had died, and how he, a machine gunner, had killed the enemy. In his sleep, he screamed the names of dead comrades. He had visited a psychiatrist at the VA hospital in Minneapolis.

Two weeks ago, Schulze went to the VA hospital in St. Cloud. He told a staff member he was thinking of killing himself, and asked to be admitted to the mental health unit, said his father a! nd stepmother, who accompanied him. They said he was told he couldn’t be admitted that day. The next day, as he spoke to a counselor in St. Cloud by phone, he was told he was No. 26 on the waiting list, his parents said.

Four days later, Schulze, 25, committed suicide in his New Prague home.

The full article can be read here.
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