- Suicide is a disease of isolation.

You're feeling alone whether you are physically alone or you just you feel that way.

I think there's active duty suicides every day.

And for those that don't die by suicide in the military, they get out and they become a Veteran Suicide.

You are definitely much more likely to die by suicide as a veteran than you are as a as someone that has not served in the United States military.

(calm music) It's extremely prevalent amongst a very small population.

You consider less than 1% of Americans serve in the United States military and they have a higher suicide rate than those that don't.

- Certainly, one is way too many.

We'd love to get to zero.

And the VA's, that top priority is veteran suicide.

So we're really putting a full court press on trying to get veteran suicides down to zero.

But I'm sorry to say that some veterans have committed suicide or successful suicides in Rhode Island.

I think in fiscal year '22 we lost seven of our veterans to suicide.

(calm music) - The VA didn't do the best job of taking care of Vietnam veterans when they returned from Vietnam.

So we're really trying to get our arms around those veterans who may not be enrolled to get that healthcare.

We think if we can get them into the VA we can continue to drop that number down.

(calm music) (calm music continues) Unfortunately you don't know if an overdose was an intentional suicide attempt or is an accidental overdose.

It's clear that some of those are suicides, right?

The question of course could be how many?

We advocate for veterans to get better access to care.

Sometimes we, in the veteran community and in the prevention community, we get a little caught up in the number.

If we can get that 17 down, then 15, that's great.

That's two less every year.

But it's still too many.

- When you're experiencing all these crazy things.

Let's talk about it.

It's not your fault.

- Yeah.

(calm music) I did two tours to Iraq.

One in 2015, and then again in 2016 in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.

We were supporting the Iraqi army.

So we got shot at with indirect fire on a very regular basis.

We spent most of our time treating Iraqi casualties.

So we saw a lot of wounded Iraqi army.

You can't escape some of the things you've seen.

I saw a lot of Iraqis that were very, very damaged.

And it's hard to put those things away.

They never go away.

(calm music) - And they grew up learning all about the war on terror.

And so David was thrilled to go there, to lead a unit there.

I know he wasn't prepared for what he was going to experience when he got there.

There were times he would call in the middle of the night and "Mom, I'm scared.

"There's bombs going off everywhere."

When David came back to the States before he was sent to 29 Palms in California to prepare for his tour to Syria, he spent some time at home and it was good.

He would tell about some of the experiences that he had been involved in.

Did we know that he probably carried some PTSD when he returned?

Yeah, we did.

You didn't pick up on anything other than that was just part of the job.

You know, that's what they all did.

And so he left to California, he was super excited.

- [Dalton] He was a great guy, right?

He was a Marines Marine.

He was dedicated to, to his craft as a machine gunner.

And he's just a good dude all around.

- And after he'd gotten settled on base, our daughter that lives out there is calling us in the middle of the night.

"Mom, Mom, we can't get ahold of David.

"Something's wrong."

One of the officers called us and said, "Mrs. Kavanaugh, I'm so sorry.

"We have found David."

(calm music) And at sunrise, 6:23 in the morning, the doorbell rings and it is two Marines in their dress blues.

Coming to tell us that our son is gone.

- [Dalton] I close my eyes and I can still see Sergeant Kavanaugh on the ground with the gun in hand in a in a pool of his own blood.

So it's, those images never go away.

And it's, as you get further and further away from it, it's harder and harder to move past it.

Right?

- His twin brother, Tommy, he had gotten out of the Marine Corps, went through firefighting school, had become a paramedic, and we never saw him sober again.

You could just tell he had this anger that was unbelievable.

He had a sense of abandonment by his brother.

'Cause they were identical twins.

And so one day he just wrote a letter to our whole family and just said, "I came into this world connected to my brother "and I can't wake up every day and look in the mirror "and see his face and know that he's not here.

"And so I'm gonna go be with my brother."

And went back to his apartment, committed suicide.

And it was unbelievable.

Just unbelievable.

- Because of my line of work I know of between 25 and 30 have died by suicide.

You know, there's a a huge culture of alcohol use in the military.

And we, we drink, right?

We drink when we're happy, we drink when we're sad, we drink to celebrate, we drink to mourn.

You'll find yourself trying to drink it away.

So when you're under the influence to the point where you you no longer see suicide as a bad idea, it makes it something that you you could bring yourself to do.

I think that's the piece we can really approach to start slowing down veteran suicides.

(calm music) I think a lot of veterans have had a suicidal ideation.

I'd be lying if I told you I haven't had the thoughts, right?

I had a gun in my hand once.

I was luckily I was I kind of came to and put it down.

I wish I could say there's a way to end veteran suicide but there isn't.

There's no way to guarantee that veteran suicide is gonna end.

And anybody that suggests otherwise is are they lying or they're not being realistic.

But we can absolutely reduce the frequency.

And the way we do that is we get engaged, getting them engaged in other things.

Whether that's emotional support animals, right?

Dog training.

I think dogs are a really good way to get veterans engaged in things.

- When you have such intense grief, you have to find a purpose for your pain.

Canines for Warriors, their mission is to prevent warrior suicide through assigning a service dog.

We've trained them in our house and given them a dog to where now they can go be in the world.

It's been an incredible healing process for us as well.

Have these dogs in our home where they give us comfort and support and then we get to turn that leash over to another warrior and say because our son didn't have this opportunity, we wanna give this opportunity so that no other parent gets that phone call that we got.

- [Dalton] It's about re-engaging in the community.

Getting re-engaged is kind of that first step into getting the mental health help.

If you're, even if you're resistant to it.

- Hey, at Comic-Con we're gonna see a lot of veterans that we otherwise wouldn't normally see.

Veterans that have never heard of the Vet Center before.

There aren't aware of our services.

- Hey.

- Hey.

First of all, welcome home.

- [Veteran] Thank you, oh, I appreciate that.

- Do you know about the vet center?

- The what?

- We don't.

- The Vet Center.

We're part of the VA but we're separate from the medical center.

We do readjustment counseling services, all right.

That's our bread and butter.

When we lose the military service, a lot of us we don't know what's next.

There's not necessarily a plan.

So that's why we really try to focus on giving them opportunities to experience new things.

We have licensed clinicians you can come in and talk to.

It's all confidential.

We do a lot of veteran engagement pieces and we do the archery every Monday night with Americans and bow hunters.

Just yesterday I had three Vietnam veterans in Mystic, Connecticut with me on a fishing charter free of charge.

'Cause the goal is for you to go do it again.

- [Veteran] Right, right.

- Yeah, we want you to want this to be a new hobby.

Hobbies are so important to our community.

'Cause the last thing we want is the veterans to go home and do nothing.

We have Dungeons and Dragons for Veterans.

You know, that's when we get stuck in our own heads.

You know, that's when we start thinking too much.

I actually embed a clinician into that group.

'Cause we find that a lot of veterans they'll say a veteran has violent tendencies.

- [Veteran] Right.

- They tend to have violent tendencies in the game.

And then after the session our clinician goes over that stuff with them and says, "Hey, why did you attack that poor guy?

"He wasn't doing anything."

We need to be engaged.

And veterans do so much better when we engage with each other.

- [Veteran] We're a family of sorts.

- We are family.

- Yeah.

- So if you need something, anything, you call me, call me one Marine to another Marine.

It's that easy, brother.

All right, Semper Fi brother.

- Hoorah.

- Hoorah.

You know, we're gonna have a clinician on site just in case any veterans approach us and are in crisis and need to talk to somebody.

We have full confidentiality access in the Mobile Vet Center.

How many people know that they can come here and get the level of care that they're gonna get?

And we hope that they all know about it and that they can come out here.

Just in general, we hope that they know about us so that they reach out to us if they need us.

I'll stop by and see you guys.

- Yeah, I think we're seeing a shift, right?

People are being more and more comfortable with the ideas of therapy, with approaching mental health and substance use, getting access to that care.

They're still a stigma.

They're told for the course of at least four sometimes up to 30 years, that mental health that it cares for the weak when they get out, they're gonna continue thinking that.

- The first thing you feel in suicide as a parent is guilt.

What were the signs that I didn't see?

There's no place for us within the system to talk about what we experience.

We've gotta have the military accept that these men and women talk about these traumatic experiences.

(gun blasting) - I think it's changing.

If they serve in an environment where getting access to that care is easy and it's accessible and it's acceptable within the unit to get that care when they get out, they they will continue to engage.

(calm music)