Giving Compass' Take:

• Panelists convened by the Heritage Foundation concluded that the Trump administration should remove roadblocks to faith-based efforts to help prevent veteran suicide.

• Is there sufficient evidence suggesting that faith-based efforts would be more impactful than secular ones? Could faith-based programs exclude and/or alienate struggling veterans?  

• Learn about an app connecting veterans to talk about mental health and trauma. 

The Heritage Foundation convened a panel to discuss post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and veteran suicide from the faith angle. The panel was chaired by myself, a 30-year veteran of the Army Special Forces, and the members included Richard Glickstein, an advocate working to move the government to appropriately address the crisis; Dr. David LeMay, a medical doctor who specializes in rehabilitation; and Lt. Col. Damon Friedman, an active duty Air Force special operator, who also leads a veterans service organization called Shield of Faith Missions.

A top VA official recently said that “[s]uicide rates among veterans 34 and younger have spiked in the last two years, leading the Department of Veterans Affairs to focus more on the 18 to 34-year-old age group than civilian programs for suicide prevention.”

So what can be done today?

The panel concluded that the administration should take one of two courses. One is more bold, the other a bit more limited.

The first is for the president to issue an executive order to immediately remove all roadblocks to the inclusion of faith-based programs, and to immediately introduce such programs into both the VA and Department of Defense. This should include maximum use of the chaplaincy in both departments, mandated cooperation between the chaplains and the medical personal, and the leveraging of existing (albeit small) non-governmental organizations like Shield of Faith Missions, which already exist around the country.

The more limited option would be for the president to mandate a study on the effectiveness of faith-based approaches, which would add to existing research. This time, the survey instruments should be left to the experts, and the lawyers should be kept away.  This would not be as rapid or robust as the first option, but it would put to rest any further debate—one way or the other—as to the use of faith programs.

Read the full article about faith-based efforts by Steven Bucci at The Heritage Foundation.