Grand Praire, TX. Rebecca Morrison with some of her husband Ian's belongings in her parents homes. Ian, an AH-64 Apache Helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army committed suicide on March 21, 2012. Ian chose 'Ike' for Rebecca.
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On Tuesday, March 20, Morrison tried to enroll in an Army sleep study but was told he couldn't join for a month. "Well, I'll just keep taking Ambien and then go see the flight surgeon," he told the woman involved with the study. She asked if he felt like hurting himself. "No, ma'am, you don't have to worry about me at all," he said. "I would never do that." That day, Morrison typed an entry in his journal: "These are the things I know that I can't change: whether or not the house sells, the state of the economy, and the world ... these are things that I know to be true: I'm going to be alive tomorrow, I will continue to breathe and get through this, and God is sovereign over my life."
Rebecca awoke the next morning to find her husband doing yoga. "I'm self-medicating," he told her. She knew what that meant. "You couldn't sleep again, huh?" Rebecca asked.
"No," Morrison said. "I'm going back to the doctor today." Given the lack of success with the medication, she told him that was probably a good idea. She left the house, heading for the elementary school on post where she taught second grade.
A System Overwhelmed
The Army reported in January that there was no way to tell how well its suicide-prevention programs were working, but it estimated that without such interventions, the number of suicides could have been four times as high. Since 2009, the Pentagon's ranks of mental-health professionals have grown by 35%, nearing 10,000. But there is a national shortage of such personnel, which means the Army is competing with the VA and other services--not to mention the civilian world--to hire the people it needs. The Army has only 80% of the psychiatrists and 88% of the social workers and behavioral-health nurses recommended by the VA. Frequent moves from post to post mean that soldiers change therapists often, if they can find one, and mental-health records are not always transferred.
Military mental-health professionals complain that the Army seemed to have put its suicide-prevention efforts on the back burner after Chiarelli, a suicide fighter, left the service in January. "My husband did not want to die," Rebecca says. "Ian tried to get help--six times in all ... Think about all the guys who don't even try to get help because of the stigma. Ian was so past the stigma, he didn't care. He just wanted to be healthy."
The Breaking Point
On March 15, McCaddon gave a medical presentation that got rave reviews. Then he called Massachusetts to speak to his children and sent Leslie that last e-mail. He regretted his failures as a husband, as a father. Don't tell the children how I died, he begged her. "Know that I love you and my biggest regret in life will always be failing to cherish that, and instead forsaking it." Leslie read the e-mail in horror. "In the back of my mind, I'm saying to myself, He's at work--he's safe," she recalls. "It never occurred to me that he would do what he did at work." But she immediately dialed the hospital's delivery center. She had just received a suicide note from her husband, she told the doctor who answered, and they needed to find him immediately. The hospital staff fanned out.