The brain and the body
On Veterans Day, preventative care, and the need to integrate the brain into our view of the body as a whole
A misleading figure is often circulated on Veterans Day: The estimate that American military veterans take their own lives at a rate of 22 per day. While that figure has had a mobilizing effect on certain resources, it may also be misleading in its apparent precision.
■ Regardless of the actual number, society certainly has a common interest in reducing it to as few as possible. And the particular way in which we furnish health care for servicemembers and veterans alike presents an opportunity.
■ There is an obvious intersection between mental health care and suicide prevention. But even though we have population-level care for things like infectious-disease prevention, we have only made limited progress has ever been made in supplying population-level care for mental wellness.
■ That presents an opportunity, were we to grasp it: The Department of Veterans Affairs has a unique level of reach through which to address mental wellness care at a population-level scale.
■ To do that well, though, we need policy-makers to commit resources towards that kind of research not as an effort to "solve" a particular problem affecting veterans, but rather as a way to address mental wellness as part of a holistic approach to human health generally. The veteran population doesn't look exactly like the public at large, but it's coming closer in several significant ways.
■ As it does so, we have the opportunity to make progress on those population-level efforts not by treating veterans as an intrinsically "broken" population needing to be "fixed", but as an increasingly representative fraction of the general population needing (and deserving) mental-wellness care in much the same way as the population at large. Just as it improved society for the military to lead the vanguard of racial integration (imperfectly, but significantly), so too would it improve society for the same population to help lead a more holistic approach to treating the brain as an essential part of the body.