Veterans for Common Sense sued VA after hearing of suicidal veterans being turned away from facilities when looking for help.  At the trial, it was revealed that Dr. Ira Katz, head of Mental Health Services at VA, orchestrated a cover-up of true statistics about suicide attempts among veterans.  The true numbers are devastating, with 120 veterans attempting suicide every week.  Below, editorial columnists around the nation react.

Editorial #1 from Maryland / West Virginia -- "Shhh!"  <Cumberland Times News>

Veterans Administration officials were doing a lot of explaining and apologizing when they appeared on Capitol Hill this week to face the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

They were answering charges that the VA has not been truthful about veterans' suicides. The criticism became even harsher after an e-mail entitled "Shh!" surfaced. The e-mail's author told the panel he deeply regrets the subject line. "It was an error and I apologize for that," said Dr. Ira Katz, VA mental health director.

The e-mail claims 12,000 veterans a year attempt suicide while under department treatment. "Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles upon it?" the message asks. The text came to light during a trial in San Francisco that suggested some at the VA might have been attempting to hide the number of attempted suicides b y those under the agency's care.

VA Secretary James Peake said he wanted to set the record straight about the suicide numbers. He said of the nearly 500,000 veterans who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq and then left the military from 2002-2005, 144 had taken their own lives. He said that rate is slightly higher than would be expected in the comparable general population, but it was not a statistically significant amount. Peake said he wants the VA to be more forthcoming and transparent.

If the VA is to have the trust of the public - and Congress - it needs to honestly deal with the issue of veterans' suicides. Rep. Bob Filner (D-Calif.) accuses the agency of criminal negligence in the handling of suicide data, and of having a history of cover-ups.

Now that the agency has been called out by a Congressional panel, it is time to take on that transparency that Peake says he wants.

Editorial #2 from Minnesota -- "VA Says It Doesn't Know Much About Why Veterans Commit Suicide" <McClatchy-Tribune>

Members of Congress who questioned Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake and his top aides about suicides among veterans accused them of hiding information about the issue.

The officials' response was simple, but hardly comforting: The VA wasn't covering up the truth, they said, because it didn't know the truth.

Last week's hearing of the House Veterans Affairs Committee was aimed at finding out whether service members who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are killing themselves in large numbers.

But where one might expect precise, up-to-date statistics there instead are incomplete figures with a decided time lag.

Here is some of what is known, according to the most recent government figures:

-- An estimated 18 veterans kill themselves each day, or almost 6,600 a year; that number includes all veterans.

-- Almost three-quarters of them had not been receiving care from VA facilities.

-- Only 144 veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan committed suicide over a four-year period, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

One major problem with the data is that it stops in 2005 -- thus vastly understating the number of suicides of Iraq or Afghanistan veterans. The Iraq war didn't start until 2003, and relatively few combat troops had left the military by 2005. In addition, the Iraqi insurgency grew increasingly violent in recent years.

And the risk factors for post-traumatic stress disorder, which can lead to depression and suicide, have increased, largely because of multiple deployments.

A rise in suicides among Iraq or Afghanistan veterans is shown by figures obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from internal government e-mails, with the 144 suicides consisting of 7 in 2002, 21 in 2003, 48 in 2004 and 68 in 2005.

"I'm suspicious that we're not getting all the statistics," says Matthew Cary, president of Veterans & Military Families for Progress. "I don't understand why we don't have the most recent data."

Department of Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Alison Aikele says rates have been fairly steady among all veterans, and that there is no indication of an epidemic, "which is not to downplay the problem."

Aikele says the department relies for figures on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the only agency tracking death nationwide. The 2005 numbers are the latest available. With 25 million veterans nationwide, compiling data is time-consuming, she adds.

By comparison, the Department of Labor recently put out its annual figures for injuries, illnesses, deaths, federal investigations and penalties for fiscal year 2007. That includes 146 million workers.

David Segal, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, says suicide figures are difficult to compile. "What if someone drives their car into an abutment? Is that a suicide? If they don't leave a suicide note, it's hard to tell. Most people who study suicide assume that whatever the figure is, it's an underestimation, for any group of people," Segal says.

In 2005, Aikele says, the VA took the names of everyone enrolled in its care and sent them to the CDC, asking who was on the overall list of those who had died, and how had they died. It turned out that 1,784 veterans had died of suicide, which worked out to four or five a day.

CDC maintains two relevant types of data, Aikele said, the National Death Index and the National Violent Death Reporting System. The index lists the cause of death for everyone who dies in the United States, but doesn't indicate whether they're a veteran or not, so using that data requires the VA to send a list of names of veterans. The resulting list includes only those veterans who have used VA facilities.

The reporting system, meanwhile, compiles a report on every violent death and identifies veterans. But only 16 states participate in it, so it doesn't provide a nationwide picture.

The figure of 18 suicides a day is derived from the fact that about 32,000 people commit suicide a year, and studies have shown that one-fifth of all suicides are by veterans, Aikele says.

Administration officials say privately that they hope for a "legislative remedy" compelling all states to participate in the National Violent Death Reporting System, thereby making more comprehensive figures available on veterans' suicides.

Ramona Joyce, spokeswoman for the American Legion, says that after several years of underestimating problems of post-traumatic stress-disorder and traumatic brain injuries, since 2006 the military has set up programs to help veterans.

Peake has "taken the bull by the horns," and is undertaking a "massive outreach" to 570,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, with the American Legion helping by putting out information about mental-health programs.

But, she notes, "We can't measure those results yet, because we don't have the numbers yet from 2006 and 2007."

Editorial #3 From Colorado: "The Invisible Wounds of War" Rocky Mountain News>

It is a crude way to put it, but "they are dropping like flies." That's how one soldier I spoke with characterized the spike in suicides among servicemen coming home these days from war. With bodies intact, but minds wounded - sometimes mortally.

It's not a new phenomenon - mental trauma is a normal reaction to the abnormal horror of war. Back in the Civil War it was called "soldier's heart." In World War I, it was known as shell shock. In World War II, battle fatigue. After Vietnam, it was called Post Vietnam Syndrome. Nowadays it has a formal name: post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

But it is an invisible wound, and soldiers with injured minds often haven't gotten the treatment they needed. Some have been discouraged from even seeking treatment because of the ghost called "stigma." Some have only been told to "suck it up," get back out there and fight! Which has cost our armed forces dearly.

According to a RAND Corp. report last month, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wounded the minds of 300,000 Americans. That's because trauma is cumulative: some servicemen have been back to the battlefield as many as four times, and particularly in Iraq, they live with fear 24 hours a day because, unlike most previous wars, there is no "rear" to the front line - they are always surrounded; there is no safe haven.

That is a recipe for wartime PTSD. And for some, a prescription for suicide.

According to the military's own numbers, suicides were up 20 percent last year over the year before, with six times as many suicide attempts as there were the year before the war began. In the Veterans Administration it's even worse. E-mails, recently exposed in a federal court case, showed an average of 18 suicides a day among vets, and twice as many attempts, about a thousand a month.

In our HDNet documentary we interviewed victims of PTSD. One young infantryman who went to Iraq from Fort Carson, having seen friends blown up and himself crushed by "survivor's guilt," came home diagnosed with PTSD. But when I asked him to describe his treatment, he laughed and said, "Didn't exist." Even when he got "mental health" appointments, his line commanders made him work so he'd miss them. Eventually, he took a kitchen knife and cut his wrists. He was saved, but six hours after being released from the psych ward, he was sent back to his unit to train for redeployment to Iraq.

A Marine out of Camp Pendleton told us he came back with PTSD and was put on overnight guard duty - armed. He called his mother one night with a gun in his mouth, telling her he had killed so many innocent Iraqis, he didn't deserve to live. She kept him on the phone, praying neither battery would die, as she drove six hours to save him.

Our third interview was with the Massachusetts parents of a Marine reservist. Their son had come home and started drinking heavily - a symptom of PTSD - so they committed him to a VA hospital. But the VA wouldn't treat his PTSD until he stayed sober - like a doctor refusing to treat your head cold until you stop sneezing. Three weeks after his release, he hanged himself with a garden hose slung over a beam in his parents' basement.

What these guys - and many others - had in common was, they got wounded in the line of duty, but didn't get the treatment they deserved. In the active military the barriers were bureaucracy, stigma and the culture of courage. In the VA it was just a systemic nightmare of red tape, short staffing, long forms and long waits - obstacles that are hard enough to navigate if you're not disturbed, virtually impossible if you are.

What's the impact of these avoidable inefficiencies? More trauma - which means more PTSD, and more suicide. The Army itself warned a couple of months ago that as the number of troops in Iraq was surging, the number of mental-health providers was declining. That does not bode well for the future.

Nor does the Pentagon's take on PTSD and suicide. The top Pentagon psychiatrist told me that, most of the time, the crisis that leads to suicides is the breakup of relationships. And when it's not about relationships, it's about legal or financial problems. When I told the Massachusetts Marine reservist's parents about this, they used a word I wasn't able to put to put on television.

It's fair to say that at least a few positive changes are taking root. The new commanding general at Fort Carson, who lost one of his own sons to suicide and another to combat, is teaching troops and commanders that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. Several state National Guard units have pilot programs for "reintegration." They invite Guardsmen returned from war and their families to come for counseling and bonding 30, 60 and 90 days after returning home.

Some who come back from war have been driven over the edge not just by combat, but by their experiences when they got home. They are casualties just like casualties on the battlefield. The difference is, if we ever build a Vietnam-type wall to honor the victims of Iraq and Afghanistan, their names won't be on it.

Editorial #4 From Texas: "Shh!" <Houston Chronicle>

Legislators are justifiably irate at what they see as yet another area in which the Department of Veterans Affairs is not only failing to provide care to veterans, but also withholding information on their needs from Congress and the public.

Last November, CBS, after a five-month investigation, described a "hidden epidemic" of suicides among military veterans, significantly above national averages, with rates three times higher among the youngest veterans. VA officials challenged the validity of the report, but internal agency e-mails gave weight to CBS's claims.

Members of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee blasted the VA in an April hearing: Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., asked VA Deputy Secretary Gordon Mansfield, "How do we trust what you're saying when every time you turn around we find out that what you're saying publicly is different from what you're saying privately?"

The House Veterans Affairs Committee reacted with similar skepticism at hearings this week, as committee chair Bob Filner, D-Calif., accused the department of "criminal negligence" in its handling of suicide data. CNN reported that the committee was reacting to a December hearing in which Katz insisted media reports on suicide data had been exaggerated, only to indicate a few days later that some alarming statistics could be correct.

One particularly odious e-mail from the head of VA mental health, Ira Katz, to his colleagues was headed "Shh!" and described the previously unreleased number of attempted suicides known to VA officials — 1,000 per month. It went on, "Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" The e-mail was written shortly after the VA told CBS that there were 790 attempted suicides in all of 2007.

A class-action lawsuit filed by veterans against the VA charges that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder are not receiving the care they need because of enormous backlogs in benefits claims, and that many suicidal veterans have unsuccessfully sought mental health care. (A recent Rand Corp. study found that 320,000 troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from traumatic brain injuries, and 300,000 troops suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression.)

Last year's horrific disclosures of moldering quarters and neglect and maltreatment of patients at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center were first belittled by the Pentagon, until a vast public outcry led to firings of top brass. Yet problems at the VA persist.

Members of the House and Senate committees have called for Katz's resignation. Since he has consistently displayed more concern with covering his agency's posterior than with the welfare of its clients, that would seem a reasonable request.

As Hitner, the House committee chair, pointed out, "This is not a bureaucratic situation with numbers. This is life or death."

Editorial #5 from Kansas -- "Vets Deserve Best Mental Health Care" <The Wichita Eagle>

It's a tragedy: Some U.S. troops are surviving the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan only to take their own lives here at home.

It's shocking to learn that U.S. troop deaths from postwar suicide might outnumber combat fatalities in those two wars -- now at more than 4,500 -- according to Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, the government's top psychiatric research group. Insel said this week that the nation is failing to provide adequate mental health care for its returning veterans.

His remarks came on the heels of a Rand Corp. study last month that found that of the more than 1.6 million military members who've served in Iraq or Afghanistan, about 300,000 suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder -- and only about half of those sought counseling and treatment. For those receiving treatment, about half received substandard care.

Exactly how many vets have taken their lives isn't known for sure -- and that lack of good data is part of the problem.

But CBS News, in a months-long investigation last year, uncovered what it called a "suicide epidemic" among vets: At least 6,256 veterans committed suicide in 2005 alone -- an average of 17 a day. Vets overall were more than twice as likely as the general population to take their lives. Among young veterans ages 20 to 24, the rate was nearly four times that of the nonmilitary public.

Another estimate is that 1,000 veterans a month are attempting suicide.

At heated hearings this week, the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., charged that the Department of Veterans Affairs is either ignoring the extent of the veteran suicide problem or covering it up. Not only news organizations but also members of Congress trying to get data on veteran suicides have encountered bureaucratic resistance.

"The pattern is deny, deny, deny," Filner angrily told VA Secretary James Peake.

Veterans Affairs has taken steps in recent months to boost suicide prevention programs, such as introducing a suicide hotline number -- 1-800-273-TALK -- and moving to add suicide prevention specialists at each VA hospital.

It's good, too, that the Defense Department recently ramped up efforts to ensure that soldiers who seek mental health treatment aren't stigmatized -- 6 in 10 military enlistees in a recent survey said they believed that coming forward would hurt their careers.

Another key problem, according to Insel, is that many community mental health centers, especially in rural areas, aren't prepared or equipped to handle vets' mental health problems.

But clearly, many of our vets will be fighting personal battles for years to come -- and our nation has a duty to give them the best care possible.