Suicidal veterans’ lifeline is woefully deficient

The following editorial appeared in The New York Times:

Veterans make up 8.5 percent of America’s adult population but account for 18 percent of its suicides. In 2014, according to new data from the Veterans Affairs Department, 7,403 veterans killed themselves. That is about 20 deaths a day.

This is a national emergency, and attacking it is the primary mission of the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line, a call center based in Canandaigua, N.Y. Through phone conversations, online chats and text messages, trained operators listen and console, contact the police and hospitals if necessary, and steer callers to mental health care. Since 2007, the crisis line has been an all-purpose safety net for many thousands of veterans in free fall.

But the net is badly frayed, according to watchdog reports and news accounts from the first six months of the year. They depict a center in disarray, hobbled by incompetence and inefficiency and overwhelmed by demand.

The VA’s inspector general reported in February that calls were going unanswered or being sent to voicemail or backup call centers outside the VA. The report raised questions about poor training and oversight, citing one center where staff members had never answered voicemail messages because they didn’t know the voicemail system existed. A report in May from the Government Accountability Office found that the Crisis Line was failing to meet its goals for phone response times, and not answering all its text messages.

A new director was hired in January to tackle the center’s many problems. He lasted until June. Before he resigned, he sent internal emails, obtained by Military Times, that betray his concerns about staff members who were failing at their jobs — taking far too few calls, or refusing to answer the phone near the end of their shifts, thus needlessly diverting calls to backup centers.

“If we continue to roll over calls because we have staff that are not making an honest effort,” the director wrote, “then we are failing at our mission.”

Failure seems epidemic at this beleaguered department. That brings us to a strange thing Donald Trump said recently, in a speech about reforming the VA.

“The evidence shows,” he said, “that if veterans are in the system, receiving care, they are much less likely to take their own lives than veterans outside of this horrible, horrible and very unfair system.”

So, the VA is horrible, horrible and very unfair. And it’s saving people from suicide.

Both those statements happen to be true. The VA deserves much of its bad reputation. But even the department’s harshest critics have to admit that veterans are often better off inside the VA than out. The VA’s data show that suicide rates are highest among veterans who are 50 and older and those who do not receive VA care.

The only real solution is to sign up more veterans, and to serve them better, with greater access to mental health care and a wellrun crisis center that has the staffing, oversight and attention needed for its critical mission. The VA says it has been working to fix things. It has updated phone systems so calls do not go to voicemail. It says it has hired dozens of people and will soon have more than 300 trained responders. It is expanding mental health care for women and redoubling efforts to identify patients at high risk for suicide.

Promises and reform plans have been offered many times before. Every president, and presidential candidate, pledges to do better by veterans, but every year brings new failures. Public confidence in the VA, sorely tested, will not be repaired until the appalling suicide rate goes down, and watchdogs have no more appalling lapses to write about.