September is Suicide Prevention Month, when advocates publicize an epidemic that is taking far too many lives. Despite earnest attempts to curb the staggering rise in suicides over the past two decades, the numbers tell a disturbing tale.
Among the entire U.S. population, the age-adjusted suicide rate climbed from 10.4 per 100,00 in 2000 to 14 per 100,000 in 2021, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. For veterans, the unadjusted suicide rate increased from 23.3 per 100,000 in 2001 to 33.9 per 100,000 in 2021, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs’s National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report.
Suicide has shattered families, erased important history, and left behind pain that can never be healed.
But for some, help came at just the right time. Retired Army Sgt. 1st Class Rob Dufresne needed assistance to keep him from falling into the depths of a depression that took hold toward the end of his military career and continued for years after his military transition.
“I was lucky that I survived that period,” Dufresne now admits.
Though his mental health journey is far from finished, Dufresne told the Washington Examiner about the difficulties that nearly defeated him and how stories like his could be instrumental in combating the “suicide scourge” that affects people of all backgrounds and experiences.
Down the slippery slope
Dufresne says that jumping out of planes as an Army Ranger and later serving over two decades with Special Forces teams as a Green Beret was his “dream job.” But toward the end of his hard-charging 26-year career, a host of injuries “kind of caught up” with him.
Dufresne described one occasion when he took a sick call in the morning to ask an Army doctor for a medical remedy for the body pains that were affecting his work. As he listed off the various issues he was facing, Dufresne recalls the doctor asking him to pick a “chief complaint” that staff could address during his 15-minute healthcare visit.
“I never had just a singular chief complaint,” Dufresne explained. “I didn’t even know it was a 15-minute appointment.” But Dufresne complied with the request that he minimize his problems. Deciding that other troops must need assistance more than he did, he figured he would “just take a back seat.”
His failures to get adequate care would spawn a dangerous cycle of Dufresne assuming that the phantom needs of others took priority over his own urgent problems.
The Army responded to Dufresne’s increasing medical concerns by attempting to force him into medical retirement. Though he chose to remain in the service, physically demanding deployments with Special Forces teams were out of the question. “I was happy to be able to contribute in the way that I could,” Dufresne reported, but “what I wanted to be doing was something very different.”
Among his last assignments was a deployment to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2012. Dufresne had the vaunted task of helping stand up the Special Operations Joint Task Force — Afghanistan, which would unite the various American, NATO-ISAF, and Afghan National Army Special Operations teams in their pursuit of the Taliban enemy. What others might find a welcome and prestigious challenge was less so to Dufresne, who longed to be involved in the more kinetic effort of fighting that insurgency.
For much of his 2012-13 deployment, Dufresne was traveling to special operations camps throughout the country. It “was great in a way, but it also fed that feeling of inadequacy and wanting to do more. There were a lot of teams out there that were short … and everywhere we went, I wanted to stay,” Dufresne said.
Dufresne’s deployment was extended an extra six months to “solidify” the combined force he helped establish. His final destination was Camp Integrity, north of Hamid Karzai International Airport, the location of many infamous scenes of chaos and death in the final days of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Shortly after his return to the U.S., Dufresne heard that Camp Integrity had been attacked. The news compounded his guilt and frustration. One of the many tasks that fell to Dufresne while part of the skeleton crew establishing Camp Integrity was designing the camp’s base defense plan.
Dufresne continued to question the impact of his deployment to Kabul in the following years. “I hope we did good. I think that we did,” he explained softly. “I really wish I could have been there for those guys.”
A new question would arise in August 2021, during the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Dufresne began to wonder “how things turned out” for his Afghan counterparts, which became “one of the things that made the manner of the withdrawal pretty personally damaging for so many of us.”
Transitioning to civilian life
Survivor’s guilt, self-doubt, and feelings of inadequacy dogged Dufresne as he prepared for his transition out of the military, which was set for 2015. “I probably stayed on active duty for a little bit too long,” he admitted. “But I just wanted to do more. I wanted to contribute more. My brain wasn’t thinking right then.”
Dufresne began acting out with anger, fueled by depression. “I was in crisis in a lot of ways, and I did seek assistance on more than one occasion,” Dufresne said. Instead of giving him help, a military healthcare provider gave him a referral for mental health assistance that never came.
in Nashville, 2023.
As before, Dufresne said he “just assumed that there were people out there who need help more than I need it, so I just sucked it up.”
Leaving the military brought different struggles. Though Dufresne had never planned to derive “so much of [his] self-worth from a job,” he felt “almost completely deflated” as a veteran. He was no longer “in a position to be able to effect change or to be a teammate to people on the ground anymore. There was no longer a possibility for me to be called up because … ’the unit needs you.’ And that was a tough thing for me.”
Other veterans did not appear to be struggling with transition in Dufresne’s eyes, which only increased his feeling of inadequacy. He soon began “beating [himself] up” as his mind became “the perfect storm of just negativity, irrational thoughts, non sequiturs that I was creating to just make myself feel worse and worse.”
When Dufresne again sought out mental health assistance through the VA, “it kind of just led nowhere,” he said. He decided that it was the “last time [he would] look for help of that kind.” Once again, he turned inward.
Power of healing
Dark years followed on the heels of Dufresne’s military transition. Eventually, the people Dufresne loved helped him “kick his own ass” until he was ready to try something new.
“There wasn’t one precipitating event. It was sort of a chipping away,” Dufresne said. Some of his fellow Green Berets suggested that Dufresne talk with a professional. He was also motivated by the “love and kindness of [his] significant other [and] the support from friends and family who did not always know what was going on but knew that something was going on.” Even small interactions such as “little supportive comments here and there [and] a hug from a friend” had an outsize impact on his desire to get better.
Among those supporting voices was Dufresne’s friend Leo, who asked Dufresne to be vocal about his recovery. “We all suffered in silence for so long,” Leo told Dufresne. “It’s important that once you do heal, you heal loudly.’”
Part catchphrase, part lifeline, the “heal loudly” moniker encouraged Dufresne to morph his quiet, internal processing of anger and pain into something outward-facing.
In order to heal, Dufresne first had to reorient his point of view. “I wasn’t acknowledging that there was something wrong with my thinking,” he explained. “That I needed to get dug out of that rut so I could fix the way I viewed things and the way I viewed myself.”
Like many veterans, Dufresne had to cast aside the stigmas from his military career that seeking mental help is a sign of weakness. “For some people, it’s their command … gatekeeping [care]. It might just be the culture that has been modeled and then adopted in a unit that says, ‘If you’re going to seek assistance, you don’t belong here. We don’t need you.’”
Not wanting “to be seen as weak,” Dufresne says service members and veterans can easily “reach that point of hopelessness because they’ve had troubles and they’ve not talked about them to anyone. They feel that nobody can help them, nobody wants to help them, they’re not worth being helped.” This destructive cycle “ends up being their demise,” Dufresne said.
In some promising ways, Dufresne said he sees the culture breaking down. One of “the most impactful things” he has witnessed among his fellow veterans is the trend toward being “honest and raw” about internal battles, doubts, and struggles in print media and on a plethora of veteran-run podcasts and documentaries. Recently, Dufresne watched veterans of the Battle of Mogadishu discuss their experiences. “These guys were giants, they were legends,” Dufresne enthused. “They’re talking about things that went through their minds and their state of mind. … It’s jaw-dropping for special operations folks to hear about that.”
Inspired by this groundswell of outspokenness, Dufresne said he hopes that being vocal about his recovery will let him “reach people like myself, people who are … hiding it, stepping aside, and saying, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ve got this. Help those other people.’ It’s an honorable kind of thought, but it’s just so self-destructive. Healing loudly is all about telling those people they are worth it. They are absolutely not lesser-than.”
Healing loudly also has an “active component,” Dufresne said. “The whole idea of it is directly tied to helping other people in your lowest moment.” Even when Dufresne is struggling deeply with his own pain, he explained that having a friend reach out with struggles of their own helps him “rise to the occasion. For a fleeting moment, you don’t have any problems. You just go into ‘help mode’ because someone you love needs help.”
Dufresne admitted his healing journey is not linear and has no definitive end state. Even with his team of mental health professionals, nine years out from his own transition, Dufresne said he is “kind of in the middle of some of this.”
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The middle ground Dufresne worked hard to reach is a place where he longs to lead others. “It’s sad that with all the attention, we haven’t figured out an effective way to fight [the suicide epidemic]. We need a new strategy or we need to include other strategies in our overall campaign to fight the suicide problem in the military and veteran communities,” Dufresne explained.
Dufresne said he believes that frankly discussing mental health can be a simple but impactful part of that way forward. Just by “healing and talking about it,” survivors are “helping other people.”
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News Digital and the co-host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
