Following their tours in different conflict zones like Iraq or Afghanistan, soldiers will often suffer from depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, leading many to take their own lives - and the veteran suicide bill that was just sent to the White House aims to prevent just that.
Earlier this week, the Senate passed a new veteran suicide bill that aims to get different organisms in the government to work towards improving the quality of life of those who have come back home after serving overseas and seeing horrible things, in a way to prevent them from taking their lives due to lack of support.
According to Yahoo! News, the new veteran suicide bill was approved unanimously last Tuesday. The bill is named Clay Hunt in honor of a 26 year-old veteran that toured both Iraq and Afghanistan and then took his own life in 2011, one of many American veterans who commit suicide after getting home.
The New York Times reports that the government data says that about 22 veterans commit suicide every day in the United States. Some of them are older veterans from Korea or Vietnam, but the great majority have been in recent years, from Iraq and Afghanistan - as a matter of fact, the organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America found, after a survey, that two out of five members knew a veteran from these wars that had taken his or her own life.
As ABC News reports, the veteran suicide bill was passed 99-0 in the Senate, after passing through the House of Representatives with similar success. The only vote missing was that of Senator Mark Kirk, R-III, due to the fact that he was in Chicago during the winter storm, so all flights from the city were delayed - however, he's a co-sponsor of the bill, and would have also voted yes.
The newly approved veteran suicide bill, veterans' suicide prevention and mental health programs will go through outside evaluations to spot the best possible treatment for each patient and it will create a peer support program in many of the Veterans of America networks, among other things.
