WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, today delivered the following remarks at the Preventing Veteran Suicide summit hosted by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to mark the first anniversary of the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act and discuss further efforts to prevent suicide among veterans: 

“I’m delighted to be here today, particularly in the presence of the parents of Daniel Summers [and] the parents of Clay Hunt. You and your families are an inspiration to us. We appreciate the sacrifice you have made to illuminate the focus we need to have in the United States Senate and the United States House. Out of a tragedy good things can happen and hopefully that’s exactly what will happen out of the tragedy that has taken place in our veterans, as well as the success that we have at the seminar today.

“I’m not going to talk for a long time at all because you probably will have heard everything I’m going to say except one thing: My life was touched by suicide in 1957 when I was a teenager. So I talk about the subject not as someone who’s read about it or knew about somebody who happened to have it hit their family. It hit my family. I know the tragedy of suicide and what it can mean to a family and the many mystical things that are out there where people wonder, ‘What happened? Why couldn’t I have prevented it? Why didn’t I see it forming sooner? Why didn’t we know?’

“I think the focus of the Clay Hunt SAV Act, which we passed as the first act of this Congress out of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, was the first targeted focus for us to really look to answer those questions about why we didn’t know and find out what we could find out, [and to] take away the stigma to not talk about suicide and instead talk about it.

“For me in the VA, it happened very simply in August of 2013. We had three suicides inside of eight days at the VA hospital in Atlanta. One of them took place in the hospital. Two of them were patients being served in the hospital. It made news all over Atlanta and as a member of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, the press immediately came to me and said, ‘Why is this happening?’

“So we began to look. We had the first field hearing in 2013 in Atlanta. We brought in all the experts, and we brought in the VA. We found out we were short in terms of the number of people we needed, the number of contractors we needed and the number of physicians we needed to have a timely evaluation to bridge that dangerous period of time where somebody’s at risk for their life by taking suicide.

“We have begun since 2013 to make progress towards eliminating the time it’s taken to have services available to our veterans, increase the access to our hotlines, and provide a greater number of contractors and programs in the communities to see to it we have a continuity of care for our veterans. It’s by no means perfect, but Bob McDonald has done a great job as the secretary. I appreciate particularly Dr. Shulkin and all that he has done to focus on this issue.

“We need to make sure that if someone is at risk for their life, there’s not a stigma to call us, [but] in fact there’s a warning they know we want to hear from them. …When [our veterans] go from Department of Defense health care to VA healthcare, we need to make sure they don’t go into a black hole of a lack of attention but instead get the focus they should get as a veteran. If [our veterans] have a problem, it is our problem. It is not just their problem.

“As long as I am chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs committee, I’m going to work to do everything I can to give the VA the support and the attention they need to see to it every American veteran has timely evaluation, timely coordinating care and we begin to reduce the rate of suicide in America of our veterans and improve the quality of health care for all of them.

“God bless all of you for being here today, thank you for your support and if there’s anything we can do for you, just give us a call, we’d be glad to help.”

###

The Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs is chaired by U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., in the 114th Congress.

Isakson is a veteran himself – having served in the Georgia Air National Guard from 1966-1972 – and has been a member of the Senate VA Committee since he joined the Senate in 2005. Isakson’s home state of Georgia is home to more than a dozen military installations representing each branch of the military as well as more than 750,000 veterans.