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Veterans Advisory Committee Minutes May 28,2019 Page 4 we see or make it more known, even if its an anonymous thing, mentoring group or something like AA. Sueoka: Probably not, when they get to the point where they plan, a lot of it is self- planning. Like you said it's a selfish act. Chair Doolittle: So much of it is not a plan, so much of it is day after day you lose hope that tomorrow will be a better day. Somewhere down the line when you realize that maybe tomorrow is never going to be better, a spur of the moment incident arises where the means and availability is there and had you waited five seconds later you wouldn't have done it. Wery: A man by himself, no connection to anybody, he's not hurting anyone. But when a man has a family and friends, he's cursing them. Because that woman and those children need to live with that for the rest of their lives. He doesn't have the right to do that to them. Chair Doolittle: I understand that you don't believe they have that right, but they did it and I can't believe he didn't love his sons and didn't love his wife, so there's something else that we're missing. Wery: Obviously the love wasn't strong enough or he wouldn't have done it. Chair Doolittle: I'm not sure that I agree with that either. Debra Lewis: I do know that the suicide rate it's not just in veterans, it's double in the last decade in people under 19. It's increased 141%for other younger groups from 2011 to 2018. This is a crisis and my first job as a Second Lieutenant was investigating a suicide. Someone very close to us who we had identified needed help, went to help, but the thing is when they're in that thinking if you're not told to have someone with them all the time, which sometimes isn't possible, that's when they take that target of opportunity to talk them off the cliff when they're still very fragile and vulnerable. I think there's enough shame that happens in it that sometimes they don't think. My daughter had a young friend who came home got into an argument with her mother, got in her car jumped off a bridge in Seattle, killed herself. Gymnast, beautiful girl. Sometimes they're spur of the moment, sometimes they're well planned out. But the ideas of questions, like the blunt questions, I hadn't heard the blunt question like that. One of the questions we learned was how are you sleeping? What's happening? Are you sleep patterns interrupted? Those kinds of questions to find out what's going on with people. Others are very skilled with guarding themselves. It's a tragedy. I don't' know what we can do for this family. I don't know what's been done. Wery: There's nothing you can do.