Democrats Assail VA for Withholding Information about Veterans' Suicides

WASHINGTON — "Shh!" was a "very unfortunate" title for an internal e-mail about whether to release data on rising suicide attempts among veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs' top mental health official conceded to a congressional committee Tuesday.

"I deeply regret the subject line," Ira Katz told the House Veterans Affairs Committee during a hearing on whether the VA has covered up what some members of Congress called an "epidemic" of veteran suicides.

"Either the VA has not adequately attempted to determine the scope of the problem, which is an indictment of the VA's basic competence," said committee chairman Bob Filner, D-Calif. "Or the VA knows the extent of the problem, but has attempted to obfuscate and minimize the problem to veterans, Congress and the American people, which is an indictment of the leadership of the entire Department."

The hearing came a day after a top federal psychiatric researcher warned that the number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, according to a Bloomberg News report.

Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, cited a Rand Corporation study that found that about 26 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or other mental health disorders, and only half of them receive treatment. About 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought in the two wars since October 2001, the report said. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site.

Based on those figures and established suicide rates for similar patients who commonly develop substance abuse and other complications of post-traumatic stress disorder, "it's quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,'' Insel told Bloomberg.

Democrats on the House committee sharply criticized the VA for withholding information about such suicides.

Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz., said he asked for statistics on the problem.

"More than four months later, however, all I've gotten are excuses, complaints and, most recently, a suggestion that I 'go file a Freedom of Information Act request,' " said Mitchell, chairman of an investigative subcommittee. "That's not just an insult to me. It is an insult to this committee and to our veterans."

The committee focused much of its ire on Katz, the VA deputy chief patient care services officer for Mental Health. They accused him of misleading them when testifying at a hearing on Dec. 12, 2007.

At that time, they said, Katz disputed figures from a CBS News report. But just three days later, Katz wrote an e-mail that, in essence, confirmed the CBS numbers. Katz wrote that there are 18 suicides a day among America's 25 million veterans, which echoed the CBS statistics.

Under questioning Tuesday, Katz said he disputed only some of the CBS numbers and had reported the agreed-upon figures to the committee that day.

"There was no cover-up," he said.

However, the committee pressed him on another e-mail he sent in February to a VA public affairs official. The subject line was "Shh!"

"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities," he wrote in the e-mail. "Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"

"That e-mail was in poor tone," Katz said. But his intent was to determine the proper way to disseminate the information, not to suppress it, he told the committee.

"This is a matter of life and death," said Chairman and Democratic Rep. Bob Filner, of California, "and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled."

VA Secretary James Peake testified that statistics on veterans suicides and attempted suicides have been difficult to collect but that his agency has intensified its efforts. Fewer than half of all veterans seek treatment in VA facilities, he noted, which further complicates the collection of data.

He said a 16-state study by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that the suicide rates for veterans in the age groups 18-49 and 30-64 were higher than that of the general populace in 2005, whether or not the veterans had used the VA system.

Filner blasted what he called a "bureaucratic" response by the VA officials. He said the VA and Department of Defense should get together and devise a program where every American who has served in a war zone receives a mental health examination before returning home. It should be "mandatory," he stressed.

"We're not doing the job. I don't care what your numbers show," he told Peake.