How to end veteran suicide | Ron Self | TEDxSanQuentin

America would never send a soldier to fight without basic training. Yet we have sent thousands of vets home unprepared to handle the devastating mental damages of war. Speaking while incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, former combat veteran Ron G. Self shares his personal struggle and outlines a plan to help our veterans.

Find our more about Ron's program Boot Camp Out and the amazing work of Veterans Healing Veterans from the Inside Out (http://www.veteranshealingveterans.com/about.html), a trauma recovery program for veterans who are at risk for suicide or incarceration.

Learn more about San Quentin's exemplary Prison University Project (https://prisonuniversityproject.org/), which was just awarded the National Humanities Medal, and is expanding to prisons throughout California.

Interested in restorative justice? Check out Insight Prison Project's Victim Offender Education Group (http://www.insightprisonproject.org/victim-offender-education-group-voeg.html).

Ron G. Self, a former combat veteran of the United States Marine Corps who served from 1987 to 1996, is currently incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. While in prison, Self's personal struggles prompted him to found the self-help group Veterans Healing Veterans From The Inside Out to try to stop the alarmingly high suicide rate among veterans.

At San Quentin, Self works as the Prisoner Liaison for the Veterans Information Projec to ensure that San Quentin’s incarcerated veterans population has access to all eligible services. A strong advocate for restorative justice, = Self also facilitates two Victim Offender Education Groups (VOEG) as well as a VOEG Next Step group.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

And up next,

we have another good friend of mine.

He's a former combat veteran
of the United States Marine Corps.

He's passionate about
helping veterans in distress.

Ladies and gentlemen,
my good friend, Mr. Ron Self.

(Applause)

Hello. Thank you.

I've got to say,

I just got to pet a dog
for the first time in 19 years,

and I'm feeling some kind
of way about that.

Okay, here we go.

November 9, 2011.

A regular day just like any other day.

I walked into my cell.

Stepped up on the toilet seat.

Put a rope around my neck.

Attached it to the locker,
and stepped off.

About an hour and a half later,

I woke up on the floor.

The rope had broke, which surprised me,

because I made the rope
out of a sheet.

A four-grade rope

Soaked in water,
real good tensile strength.

Probably made 100 of those
in the Marine Corps,

towed Humvees with them.

But this one broke. Okay.

Initially what I felt was two-fold:

Shame for having attempted to kill myself,

and shame for having not succeeded.

And while I'm not a religious man,

at some level I felt the rope
broke for a reason.

Or maybe I just wanted
to believe it broke.

Okay, so I figured
I'd sit with that for a while.

About two weeks later,

I was in a prison university project
English 204 research class,

the end result being to produce

a 15 to 25 page paper
on the topic of your choice.

It was the beginning of the semester
and someone handed me a document.

Keep in mind, I didn't tell anyone
tried to kill myself, nobody knew that.

And so someone handed me this document.

And what it was was a legal opinion,

filed by Judge Reinhart
of the Ninth Circuit Court

September 2009, in response to a lawsuit

filed by the family of a veteran
who committed suicide.

In his response, he cited
a Katz suicide study,

which indicated that 18 veterans a day
were committing suicide at that time.

Throughout the course of the semester,
and in months to follow,

I went on to discover something
that I found incomprehensible.

And that is, in the 14 years,

from the start of the Iraqi War
to include the Afghanistan War,

6,855 American personnel
were killed in action.

In that same period of time,
73,000 veterans committed suicide.

Now when I share these statistics,
these numbers, with people,

they think I must be mistaken.

I'm in prison, we don't have
access to good information.

But we actually, in the college program,

we have real good access to a lot
of literature to do the research,

and that's an accurate number.

And I went on to discover
a few other things.

And that is that I don't know why
that number's so high.

I can only speak
for a small percentage of it.

So that's what I'm going
to talk about right now.

And when I explain that to people,
what I ask them to understand,

is that the relationship forged
between men in combat

is similar to that
between a parent and a child.

And for a veteran, there's no greater loss
than than that of a brother in combat.

To actually see him fall.

And the biggest lie of your life, you tell
to yourself the rest of your life;

that being, you could have done
something different to alter that outcome

And you simply couldn't.

And while you saw them fall,
you know they're gone;

they're not really gone.

Because every night
when you close your eyes,

you see their faces
in the shadows of your dreams,

constant reminders of the brotherhood,

of the camaraderie, of the family
you search for the rest of your life

but intuitively know you will never find.

Now friends and family,

they try to span that emotional divide.

They try to bridge the gap.

But it's pointless.

I mean, they may as well look
to the stars and try and talk to people

in a distant galaxy as talk to you.

And that's because serving with men

that died by your side,

sometimes in your arms,

proving their worth to you

has rendered pre-war family and friends

untrustworthy, undependable.

Translation: there's a stranger among us.
That stranger's the veteran. Its me.

So, clearly the seeds of suicide,

in my opinion,
are planted on the battlefield.

And they remain dormant for the most part
while you're on the battlefield.

Only now your tour of duty's up
and it's time to rotate back home,

or you get injured.

Either way you're coming back home,
and that's where they start to grow.

From the second
you step foot on that plane

and arrive at the very same airports

that our brothers and sisters
from Vietnam arrived at

and were greeted by people

calling them names, like, "Baby killer,"
"Murderer," "War criminal,"

"Go away," "We don't want you
in our country."

I've got to say, America gave itself
a good ass-kicking

in how it treated Vietnam veterans.

Only now it's 45 years later,
and this generation of veterans

from the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan,

and a dozen other places
you've never heard of

are returning home and they're arriving
at those very same airports.

And it's become an opportunity

for those people that gave
the Vietnam veterans

such a hard time to redeem themselves.

It's become an opportunity
for America to redeem itself

in relation to how
it treats its veterans.

And so, we step off the plane.

People are waving flags.

"Welcome home, you're a hero,
we love you, we're so proud of you."

And while many of the Vietnam veterans

would have appreciated
that type of reception,

they, and this is the hard part,

as this generation of veterans knows,
there's some truth to those insults.

You see many of the things
that happen in combat

simply do not translate
into being a hero.

Yet you come back, and everybody's saying,
"You're a hero. We're so proud of you."

So, we come back, and that's all
we we ever wanted was to make it back.

And now that you are back,
you've never felt so alone.

You never felt so much
guilt and shame in your life.

Now you just want to go back.

And you won't have to worry
about thanking people

for thanking you for your service.

You won't have to worry about
feeling like you're alienating people,

and that's just what you do,
you alienate everybody around you.

And there's a reason for that

because if you let anybody in,
if you let anybody get close,

you might lose them.

And the thought of losing anyone else

just brings you back to losing
your brothers in combat.

And for many veterans,

it's just that you can't go back to war.

And you can't go forward,
or you feel like you can't go forward.

The easiest solution for many
is just to chamber around.

And drop the hammer.

That's what many do.

Another option, clearly my option,
is I came to prison.

Coming to prison is a different path
to the same destination: death.

It's just a slower path.

Only for me, as you know, the rope broke.

And when the rope broke,
a solution appeared to me.

And in 2012, I founded "Veterans
Healing Veterans From the Inside Out."

And in it what I believe

is the solution to the problem
of the high rate of suicides.

Now, it's really simple.

As some things in life are.

When you join the military,

it's understood that you
have to graduate boot camp

to go on to be a member
of that branch of service.

If you think of society
as a branch of service, which it is,

before you can return to it
from the military,

you have to complete Boot Camp Out.

To not implement Boot Camp Out,

and have veterans complete it,
in my opinion,

is the equivalent of bringing
a 60-ton Abrams tank back from war,

painting it yellow,

slapping some stickers on it,
and calling it a school bus.

That's not going to work out too well.

Can you imagine a big yellow Abrams tank,
cruising down the street,

leaving a wake of torn-up asphalt,
crushed cars behind it?

It's not trying to do that,
it's not trying to be destructive.

But it's a tank. It's a weapon of war.

When the veteran comes back
from war,it's the same thing.

For that tank to be a school bus,
clearly some changes have to be made.

And that's what Boot Camp Out's about;
it's about making those changes.

Now, Boot Camp In,

first thing you do in the morning
is strap on your combat boots,

put your rucksack on, check your weapon,
make sure it's sighted and good to go.

Boot Camp Out's the opposite of that.

First thing you do in the morning
is you put on your flip-flops,

your board shorts, baseball cap.

Daily exercise begins with yoga, meditation,
maybe a few laps in the pool,

mountain bike riding.

Definitely not a backpack carrying an M16.

The heart of the program would revolve
around narration therapy.

Now, most veterans,
myself included, will tell you,

"I don't need to write
my experiences of war down.

I lived them.

They're forever burned into my memories,
etched into my soul."

But there's something
about writing them down.

They're tangible now.

You can hold them, look at them,

relate to them in a different way
than just thinking about them.

And when you share those experiences

with other veterans
that have similar experiences,

something starts to happen.

Something unexpected, something
you didn't think could ever happen again.

You start to feel a connection.
You start to feel alive.

And you learn that it's okay

to take one step out of the shadows
of denial and depression.

And that it's okay to share
those repressed and subdued memories.

And every time you do that,

every time you share that
with another group of veterans,

it gets easier.

It has for me.

Now the program I speak of
will be unprecedented in military history

because it doesn't exist yet.

There is no Boot Camp Out.
There never has been.

Now the powers that be will say,
"We're doing plenty.

We're addressing the problem.
We have programs in place."

And I would say, as evidenced
by the high rate of suicide, the 73,000,

that those programs are ineffective.

Now in the military,
it's all about the chain of command.

So, the orders come from the top down.

Being here in prison, San Quentin,

I couldn't be any farther away
from that chain of command.

And that's why I need your help.

We need people of power and influence
to help make this program happen.

Without people of power and influence,
this program won't exist.

Now America claims
to love and support its veterans.

I say, prove it.

We ask that you use your power,
your influence,

to advocate for a change
in how veterans re-enter society.

Advocate for this change.

I would ask you to contact "Veterans
Healing Veterans From the Inside Out"

to find out what you can do,
what more you can do,

to help us save our brothers and sisters,

your brothers and sisters,
your sons and daughters,

from a fate that's undeserving of them
and their service to this country.

And one other thing.

It's not often that people
from all walks of life

can actually make history.

And this is what this is; an opportunity
for everybody here, everybody in blue,

everybody that's come in from the street,
everybody that hears this message,

to get involved and make
Boot Camp Out happen.

We already have a version of it
here at San Quentin Prison.

Of course, it's a smaller,
scaled-down version.

I don't think I can convince
the Warden to put a pool in.

(Laughter)

But it's a very successful program
that we have here.

And we have several veterans

that have paroled from San Quentin
and they're thriving.

So, we have a good idea
of what to do and how to do it.

We just need your help to do it.

So, before I leave,
all I'm going to say is,

I'm just asking for your help.

Thank you.

(Applause)