In 2011, RAND researchers published The War Within , a comprehensive look at suicide in the military. One of the driving forces behind the research was senior behavioral scientist Terri Tanielian, whose father, a veteran, committed suicide. Evidence-based treatment not only improves recovery rates but saves money, Tanielian says. In 2008, she and other researchers estimated the 2-year societal costs of postdeployment mental health problems among veterans who had served since the September 11, 2001, attacks at approximately $6.2 billion (in 2007 dollars). If all veterans received high-quality care for depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and other conditions, those costs could be reduced by $1.2 billion, they found.
The RAND report emphasizes that suicide and mental health issues are a national problem, not just a VA problem. “We can’t think about addressing these issues in the veteran population without thinking about them for the larger American population,” Tanielian says. “We can’t keep pointing a finger at the DoD and the VA. We have to think about this as the national public health crisis that it is.”