Veteran Suicide

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Morgan (Portsmouth South) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered veteran suicide.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry.

“I love my family but hate my life. I need help. I’m scared now it hurts.” Those are the words sent in an email to the mental health services by David Jonathon Jukes, who served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq twice, and Afghanistan. David Jukes was incredibly brave, as is his wife Jo, who has given me permission to share his heart-wrenching story. Despite what he did for his country, Dave was let down in his time of need. He was let down in 1997, when he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder but still deployed to a war zone. He was let down in 2012, when he returned from Afghanistan and was not properly diagnosed with a personality disorder. He was let down in 2018, when his priority need was not properly recorded and he was forced to wait weeks to see a doctor.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I am horrified to hear that David was deployed if he had been diagnosed with PTSD. I am really surprised that that happened; I would not have thought any commanding officer would have sanctioned that. If the hon. Gentleman says that happened, so it did, but they should not have allowed him to deploy, because someone with PTSD can be a really big problem for his friends who he has to protect, as they have to protect him.

[Stephen Morgan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I will carry on with my story, and explain a bit more about this personal case.

David was let down by the crisis team that turned him away because he was not in its records, and he was let down when a two-hour stand-off with eight police officers and two negotiators did not result in his sectioning for his own safety. He was let down by the home treatment team when it did not respond to 26 phone calls made by his loving wife, and refused to come out to support him. On 9 October 2018, David Jonathon Jukes, a veteran of five conflicts and a hero by anyone’s standards, took his own life. That truly harrowing tale is indicative of many other instances of veterans being passed around by Departments without any kind of tailored approach to their mental health services, and that is why we are here today.

There are about 5 million members of the armed forces community in the UK, and about 15,000 men and women leave service each year. It is important to stress that the majority of those individuals do not experience a decline in mental health upon their transition to civilian life, but we are here to talk about those who do. Last year, 58 veterans took their own life. That is a shocking statistic—but most important, a shocking loss of life.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan) for securing this debate. I agree with much of what he said. He is right to say that, historically, there has been a disconnect between what the MOD and the NHS do in providing better care for veterans. When I was a Health Minister, I worked with the then Minister of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois), to improve mental health support, first aid training and other support and help available to armed services families. We also worked to support the MOD in better tracking veterans immediately after discharge from the services. I entirely agree with the point the hon. Gentleman made about one year not being enough.

To put the debate in context—it is important that we have the right evidence and data to support the making of informed decisions about veterans’ care—overall suicide rates for those serving in the armed forces are low, with the exception of males in the Army aged between 16 and 19. Evidence suggests that elevated suicide rates among 16 to 19-year-olds are related to issues such as Deepcut-type events and difficulties adjusting to life in the armed forces, as opposed to being deployment-related.

In the US, veteran suicide rates are definitely higher than population suicide rates, but just as in the UK, and perhaps surprisingly, they do not appear to be deployment-related, and there is much speculation as to why higher rates of suicide are experienced by US veterans, as compared with UK veterans.

[Bob Stewart]

Soldiers who are between 16 and 19 can deploy on operations only for two of those years. I totally understand that there will be other reasons involved, but soldiers cannot go on operations until they are 18 years old.

[Dr Poulter]

I defer to my hon. Friend’s considerable experience as a long-standing and distinguished soldier with a long-standing and distinguished record of service in our armed forces. I had the pleasure of serving in the NHS with a number of Ministry of Defence or armed forces doctors. I certainly know that they pay particular attention to these issues now, and the MOD has put a lot more into the training and support available to their doctors to better support veterans.

We have good data on suicide rates among Falklands veterans and veterans from the 1991 Gulf war. There is no evidence to suggest that the rates of suicide among that group of veterans are any higher than those in the rest of the armed forces; in fact, there is evidence that the rate of suicide among those groups is lower than expected population rates.

We do not have reliable evidence for the more recent Iraq and Afghan conflicts—the hon. Gentleman alluded to that in his remarks. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and evidence emerging from coroners’ reports, but anecdote is not hard evidence. We need to work much harder on that to ensure that we have the hard evidence to make the right decisions.

In terms of gathering that hard data, the announcement by the Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), that the MOD has agreed to carry out definitive research by tagging all those who have served in Telic and Herrick is very much to be welcomed. That work is starting with defence statistics, but it is difficult to know how and when it will be completed—these days, it is challenging and bureaucratic to get data out of the Office for National Statistics, and that is hampered by general data protection regulation issues. However, the work that Professor Simon Wessely and his team at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience are doing with the MOD will happen and should give us the answer. Hopefully it will build a strong evidence base for improving veterans’ care in future.

Finally, we need better to join up what happens when veterans leave the Army and register with the NHS. The current situation is not right, and we need to improve it. The MOD should compulsorily register veterans with civilian healthcare services when they are discharged from the armed services. To my knowledge, that does not happen, but it should happen routinely, because it would help serving men and women transition back into civilian life. It would also flag up to GPs that somebody is a veteran and has a serving record.

It is important that we get the data right. Anything that the Minister can do to help with the issues surrounding GDPR, make the ONS data more speedily available for population-based comparisons and support the work of Professor Simon Wessely and the IoPPN, would be greatly welcome.