How You Can Help Mlitary Women and Wives by Producing Video Podcasts of Life Story Highlights They Suggest

You can produce personal history/life story highlights video to salute our troops. These video podcasts might be to help, inspire, and motivate. Salute Our Troops with how-to information on making personal history videos by interviewing the troops, their families, friends, and other veterans with your camcorder.

You can post the videos on Internet Archive or Google Video for the longer videos of one to two hours, or on uTube for the shorter videos under 15 minutes--with their permission, of course. Videos of life story excerpts can be made by the families of the troops to send to them or by the troops on their own life experiences to send to family and friends back home.

Topics might include rites of passage, experiences, life story highlights, turning points, and events. The videos are a hearty "thanks" to our nation's Wounded Warriors from Sacramento. Personal history videos and interviews of life story excerpts are memoirs of our warrior's acceptance back into the Sacramento community through re-integration, job placement and at-home care.

Remember military women and military wives, daughters, and families of our troops serving with the troops or raising families and waiting back home. You can record video, personal stories, and put photos in keepsake albums, especially digital albums to remember the troops. Here's what you can do to interview others serving with you or with you in military service and beyond to have as a time capsule for friends and family members.

Take the time to tell your experience or a significant event and turning point in your own life story. Every soldier's life story is worth a video, personal history interview, or if you're inclined to write, a biography, skit, or a novel.

This is your life. Record your personal history and save it to show to your grandchildren in the future. What's your life like as a soldier? Record it in pictures so the world can share your experiences of living, relationships, holiday celebrations, thoughts, feelings, or plans.

Do you know a female veteran in Sacramento who has had suicidal thoughts? Is suicide among women in Sacramento who are recent veterans on the rise? See the article, Struggling to serve women vets - Sacramento Living - Sacramento. Nationally, about 150,000 veterans have committed suicide since the end of the Vietnam War. Also see the article, Suicide among military service members is on the rise - Sacramento.

You're looking at three veteran generations: Vietnam veterans born in the 1940s, veterans born in the 1960s or early 1970s in the first Gulf War of the early 1990s, and veterans born in the mid- to late1980s, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and similar areas.

To see one source of the Vietnam veterans' suicide statistics, check out the World Almanac 1994, Funk & Wagnalls, NY: 956. What percentage of that applies to women veterans in Sacramento, ages 18-34, who are recent veterans, young, and in search of a future?

Also check out the site, Sacramento Valley Veterans - Resources: Mental Health Services. See, The Soldiers Project: The Soldiers Project is a private, non-profit, independent group of volunteer licensed mental health professionals including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, registered nurses and marriage and family therapists. The project provides free counseling and support to military service members who have served or who expect to serve in the Iraq and/or Afghanistan conflicts and to veterans of those conflicts.

According to a December 1, 2010 study, the suicide rate among young women veterans more than twice that of men. See the December 1, 2010 EurekAlert! news release, "Suicide rate among young women veterans more than twice that of civilians," young women veterans are nearly three times as likely as civilians to commit suicide, according to new research published by researchers at Portland State University (PSU) (Oregon) and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).

The paper, "Self-Inflicted Deaths Among Women With U.S. Military Service: A Hidden Epidemic?" appears in the December 2010 issue of Psychiatric Services, a journal published by the American
Psychiatric Association. This work is the first general population study of current suicide risk among women who've served in the U.S. military.

Read the entire study, "Datapoints: Self-Inflicted Deaths Among Women With U.S. Military Service: A Hidden Epidemic?" Also check out a related study abstract on young veteran suicide, "Suicide Risk Assessment and Content of VA Health Care Contacts Before Suicide Completion by Veterans in Oregon." According to the data, female veterans aged 18 to 34 are at highest risk.

According to the December 1, 2010 news release, "Women veterans are more likely to complete suicide than nonveteran women," said Bentson McFarland, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry in the OHSU School of Medicine. McFarland co-authored the paper with Mark Kaplan, Dr.P.H., and Nathalie Huguet, Ph.D., of Portland State University.

"The rate was lower in the next oldest age group we studied, aged 35 to 44, and the rate was lower still among those aged 45 to 64. However, even within this age group, the rate was higher than civilian women's suicide rates." The study examined data on 5,948 female suicides committed between 2004 and 2007. In the 18 to 34 age group alone, there were: * 56 suicides among 418,132 female veterans (1 in 7,465). * 1,461 suicides among 33,257,362 nonveterans (1 in 22,763).

"This study shows that young women veterans have nearly triple the suicide rate of young women who never served in the military," said Kaplan, co-author of the study and professor of Community Health at PSU. "The elevated rates of suicide among women veterans should be a call-to-action, especially for clinicians and caregivers to be aware of warning signs and helpful prevention resources such as the Veterans Suicide Prevention Hotline [1-800-273-TALK (8255) press "1"].

The research, funded by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, tracked suicide data in the 16 states that constitute the National Violent Death Reporting System , a program within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Also see the PDF article, National Violent Death Reporting System Coding Manual Version 3.

Anne Hart writes the following three columns:
Sacramento Nutrition Examiner

Sacramento Healthy Trends Examiner

Sacramento Women's Issues Examiner