NB Minutes "CAP has had more visable suicides lately"

[RiverAux]

There seems to be some consensus here that a CAP-wide anti-suicide program isn't warranted by any evidence on the table in front of us.  And I think most would agree in having it be something our Chaplains receive training on. 

But, I don't think we're going to reach agreement on incorporating it into the CISM program due to the very heated opinions expressed in other threads as to the CISM approach. 

[heliodoc]

Here is some more for the heated debate

TRAIN outside of CAP in the REAL ES and EM world...get it accredited per those institution(s) and put that in the CAP personnel folder...

Those agencies who do this on a daily basis and have an accredited program are MORE believable than an online course

IF members have to sit in on CLC and SLS courses for CAP leadership...then it behooves those individuals in the CISM program have to sit through a 40 + hour training program  or what ever is dictated by States or accreditation authority

IF CAP was more responsible in this arena....THEY would put it on, sponsor it, and deliver the bill to NHQ and this type of training should be held every 2 years just like a NCPSC or a NESA type deal, but with the folks with the credentials

Its is a skill that is important and should treated as such.

[FW]

^ I agree totally.  However, I don't think it would be a problem for health service officers or CISM officers to get extra training if desired.  IMHO, it isn't desirable for the general membership to engage in this type of "job specific" training mentioned in the paper.

[heliodoc]

^^^
There should NOT be problem with a Wing sponsor at Wing traini ng cost to those folks who desire and want to function in that world.

Everone else .......start flaming ....It's time CAP pay for a little more not just the member

[Eclipse]

There's nothing wrong with it at all, if the Wing has the budget and the desire, however there's probably not much point to it, either.

YMMV, but the odds that a CISM coordinator or CAP Chaplain, absent an outside relationship with the member, is going to be able to have much impact in the few minutes or hours each month they work with the membership are pretty slim.

This is one of the places that the military model for CAP doesn't work.  We don't "own" the members' lives for more than a few hours or days a month.  The rest of the time they are on their own, working with medical and psychological health professionals and clergy of their choosing and belief.

In a military context, the rank-and-file have nowhere to turn but to the resources provided by their service, especially in a combat zone, and its the service's responsibility to provide for their medical, mental, and spiritual needs.

If I've got mission stress or other personal or family issues, the last person I'm going to seek as a resource is some random CISM coordinator I've never met, or a Chaplain who doesn't know me and probably isn't even from my faith.

Granted I'm an adult with resources, family, and little personal drama.  I've seen way too many cadets with personal lives that frankly are simply shocking, but I'd still question whether a low-contact-time situation with CAP CISM or Chaplains is going to be of much more than interventional value, and would seriously question the appropriateness of long-term "care" by CAP CISM or Chaplains.  That's not what we do.

[FW]

Granted I'm an adult with resources, family, and little personal drama.  I've seen way too many cadets with personal lives that frankly are simply shocking, but I'd still question whether a low-contact-time situation with CAP CISM or Chaplains is going to be of much more than interventional value, and would seriously question the appropriateness of long-term "care" by CAP CISM or Chaplains.  That's not what we do.

Very true.  It would not be appropriate to expect CISM officers or CAP Chaplains to provide anything but short term "first aide" and referral source to handle this type of incident.

[RiverAux]

Frankly, I would expect that CAP Chaplains wouldn't really need any extra training from CAP as this is the sort of thing they should already be very familiar with from their outside careers. 

[John Bryan]

There seems to be some consensus here that a CAP-wide anti-suicide program isn't warranted by any evidence on the table in front of us.  And I think most would agree in having it be something our Chaplains receive training on. 

But, I don't think we're going to reach agreement on incorporating it into the CISM program due to the very heated opinions expressed in other threads as to the CISM approach.

Two things:

1. We do not have enough chaplains to cover what we ask of the chaplain service now.

2. This is already a CISM function.....ICISF has 4 core elements of CISM training:
*Group Crisis Intervention (the only one CAP requires for CISM team membership)
*Individual Crisis Intervention and Peer Support
*Suicide Prevention, Intervention and Postvention
*Advanced Group Crisis Intervention

[John Bryan]

Frankly, I would expect that CAP Chaplains wouldn't really need any extra training from CAP as this is the sort of thing they should already be very familiar with from their outside careers.

Most of the CISM courses I have taken have been through the Salvation Army not CAP. There are a lot of clergy in all of these. And the one thing they say over and over is seminary teachs you about theology and philosophy, not crisis intervention.

[John Bryan]

How many are too many?

Many seem to think this is not a big enough issue? How many cadets or seniors can we let die by suicide? How many units can we have impacted by these deaths? When does it become a problem we should address?

I think teaching our members and leaders about signs of suicidal behavior is at least as important as teaching them how to complete an ORM form.

[RiverAux]

How many are too many?

An excellent question to ask before deciding we need to do something. 

Many seem to think this is not a big enough issue?

Because no one has provided any evidence that it actually IS an issue for CAP. 

We've already got a DDR program that has apparently never been evaluated to see if it is actually doing any good and we don't need another one along the same lines. 

CAP does not exist to solve its members personal problems.  If it was, I want to speak to whoever is in charge of finding dates for me. 

[Eclipse]

Two things:

1. We do not have enough chaplains to cover what we ask of the chaplain service now.

...and what, specifically, would that be, exactly?

[RiverAux]

Since I have to do the ORM thing, lets just use a little part of that course to back up what I've been saying.

Step 1:.  Yes it is a risk to our members.  No argument there. 

Step 2 of ORM?  Assess the risk

Assess the risks:
Quantify and qualify the probability and severity of loss from exposure to the hazard.  Examine each hazard and determine the exposure, severity and mishap probability for the activity. After a hazard is examined, risk can be established. Use the Risk Assessment
Index, to prioritize the hazards into levels of risk and work on the worst one first.

Evidently we're thinking of skipping this step as there apparently hasn't been any work to determine the probability that this would happen. 

Following that example, I'll skip to Step 6:  Supervise and Review:

Review is the systematic measurement of whether or not the benefit was worth the cost.

Since we haven't assessed the probability of this happening and it has been asserted that we can't measure the number of CAP-related suicides, there is no way to follow this part of ORM. 

So, lets use the Risk Assessment Matric to address the CAP member suicides.
Severity:  Catastrohpic (death)
Probability: Unlikely (Can assume will not occur in career/equipment service life. All members exposed. Possible, but improbable; occurs only very rarely.)

Put those together and the Risk Assessment Matrix tells us that this is a Medium Level Risk (Below Extremely High, and High, but above Low). 

So, to me this certainly wouldn't put it at the head of the line to be addressed and certainly does not warrant any sort of mandate for all members to take some sort of course. 

[Short Field]

And no where on the ORM worksheet is there a spot to say you actually trust the pilot's judgement to fly the mission safely and you believe he will fly the mission as briefed.  My point?  How many Commanders will actually flag someone as a suicide risk and get them (or their parents) to seek professional help? 

[John Bryan]

Two things:

1. We do not have enough chaplains to cover what we ask of the chaplain service now.

...and what, specifically, would that be, exactly?

Since this is not the topic of this....I will give only one example and move on.....Moral Leadership - until ever cadet & composite squadron has a chaplain or CDO I would say this is not properly covered by the CAP Chaplain Service. This is just one example.

[John Bryan]

And no where on the ORM worksheet is there a spot to say you actually trust the pilot's judgement to fly the mission safely and you believe he will fly the mission as briefed.  My point?  How many Commanders will actually flag someone as a suicide risk and get them (or their parents) to seek professional help?

Yes.....I know of a case already. I won't go into details but the answer to the question is yes. But the case did include CISM folks with training.

[John Bryan]

Since I have to do the ORM thing, lets just use a little part of that course to back up what I've been saying.

Step 1:.  Yes it is a risk to our members.  No argument there. 

Step 2 of ORM?  Assess the risk

Assess the risks:
Quantify and qualify the probability and severity of loss from exposure to the hazard.  Examine each hazard and determine the exposure, severity and mishap probability for the activity. After a hazard is examined, risk can be established. Use the Risk Assessment
Index, to prioritize the hazards into levels of risk and work on the worst one first.

Evidently we're thinking of skipping this step as there apparently hasn't been any work to determine the probability that this would happen. 

Following that example, I'll skip to Step 6:  Supervise and Review:

Review is the systematic measurement of whether or not the benefit was worth the cost.

Since we haven't assessed the probability of this happening and it has been asserted that we can't measure the number of CAP-related suicides, there is no way to follow this part of ORM. 

So, lets use the Risk Assessment Matric to address the CAP member suicides.
Severity:  Catastrohpic (death)
Probability: Unlikely (Can assume will not occur in career/equipment service life. All members exposed. Possible, but improbable; occurs only very rarely.)

Put those together and the Risk Assessment Matrix tells us that this is a Medium Level Risk (Below Extremely High, and High, but above Low). 

So, to me this certainly wouldn't put it at the head of the line to be addressed and certainly does not warrant any sort of mandate for all members to take some sort of course.

Depends.....again I don't feel we should get into details but I know my wing has had the issue come up 3 times in the last 9 months. Some wings it might not have been an issue in years.

What does it hurt to error on the side of safety....does training our members hurt anyone....can it  maybe help someone?

How many times has a Ground Team from your wing saved a life.....my wing it has not happend in over 20 years or more but we still train.

My wing has only lost one plane in 67 years of operations yet we still have a flight safety program. We would not wait till we were having a crash a week and 52 deaths a year before we addressed a flight safety issue. Prevention seems worth the time.

[RiverAux]

John, if thought there was a chance that all we were talking about was NHQ providing some background information, an article about it, or even just a presentation that would be made available for use by squadrons, I would be on board.

However, NHQ is beginning to convince me that they have no sense of proportionality and I am about 85% confident that we will end up with an ill-conceived mandated program that will be implemented in haste with little stufy of what we're trying to achieve and no follow-up to see if we've achieved anything.   

I'm no opponent of additional training and I've supported the program as we've strengthened ES requirements over the years and have even suggested we go farther in certain areas.  I've battled against those that suggested we've putting too many mandates on our members.  While certainly not the most vocal person, I've generally supported the positions of those wanting to see improvements in the quality of our officer training. 

But, we seem to have turned some crazy corner this past year and these broad mandates have just exploded and I see no signs of this letting up and no evidence that they're worth the trouble. 

Every volunteer has their own version of the risk matrix discussed in ORM.  But, the key factors involve the time and money it costs a volunteer to participate in the program vs the rewards they get from that (however they want to define it).  The more we move away from requirements directly related to our purposes, the worse off CAP gets in that matrix. 

When it comes right down to it, we're basically here to teach the cadets about aviation not to make sure they don't commit suicide.  We should definetely provide an environment that doesn't contribute to such thoughts, but thats as far as we should be going.         

[ZigZag911]

Here is some more for the heated debate

TRAIN outside of CAP in the REAL ES and EM world...get it accredited per those institution(s) and put that in the CAP personnel folder...

All CIS training is accredited by a national agency, the ICISF, based in Maryland....any CAP members qualified in CIS have completed rigorous training to their standards.

[Ned]

Again Ned, you and the other out of touch "leaders" at NHQ don't know if you can field an effective program, but you can cram a bunch more useless, time consuming, restrictive mandates down the throats of our paying volunteer members for problems that don't exist or that you lack the "expertise and recourses" for so that the NB can have a warm fuzzy feeling when they sit at the bar and pat each other on the back.

Maj Robertson,

My sense is that you were a little angry when you wrote this.

You are certainly correct that I don't know if CAP can or should field an effective, evidence-based program.  I've said as much in this very thread.

But that is the point of the National Staff taking a look at the problem.  So we can figure out if we can.  Somebody else posted figures that suggested that we may well be losing 20 or more cadets to suicide every year.  And that is consistent with the statistics I've seen for our cadet age group. 

Darin and others are correct that this is "only" the third leading cause of death for cadets, but preliminary ORM may well suggest that with the proper program, we could save more cadets with an effective suicide prevention program than a "buckle-up" program to reduce death by automobile accidents.

But the bottom line is that we don't and can't know until we do our homework.  The paper presented to the NB (for their use) is part of the normal staff cycle. 

I may be naive, but I am having trouble understanding the anger and pushback on this subject.  We don't yet have anything approaching consensus on how to proceed, let alone a specific proposal that can be debated and ORM's on its merits.

It's not like we are spending appropriated or corporate dollars on research and consultants.  We have volunteer staff members gathering data and reviewing existing programs.  I certainly appreciate all the advice on how I and other staffers should spend our volunteer time and how we should prioritize our duties.  It is part of my job to listen to the concerns of the members.  And I've got your vote down for "don't bother looking at potential suicide prevention programs."  And it is not like this is the only project on my plate; or even the project with the highest priority.  I have lot's of other projects to do, just like any other staffer.  As others on this board can recall, I have been researching and seeking input in this area since last fall.  I will probably continue to do so until we reach a conclusion one way or another.

But probably not here on CT.   



Finally, as a senior CP leader, I'll bet you've taught classes on the CAP Core Value of "Respect."  That's the one that talks about "members treat[ing] each other with fairness and dignity and working together as a team."

Time to review those lesson plans again.

Just saying . . .

Ned Lee