The Rosy Spin

Written by Tim Kirk at WHC

2 September 2025

Veteran Suicide Prevention: The VA’s Rosy Spin Doesn’t Hide the Grim Reality

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has spent billions of dollars on suicide prevention programs since 2001, annually releasing glossy reports claiming progress and cherry-picking statistics to tell a rosier story. But what if we read between the government lines? It turns out that the VA’s rosy spin on veteran suicide hides the grim reality: the crisis is a worsening mess, the VA’s numbers don’t back up their claims of progress and unadjusted death counts show the country is no closer to solving the problem than it was two decades ago. Here is a data-driven, skeptical dive into the VA’s reports since 2001. This article focuses on real numbers without the bias to get as close as possible to the actual suicide problem, avoiding some of the subgroups where the VA crafts the progress narrative.

The Raw Numbers: No Big Wins

The 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report published by the VA in December 2024^[1] highlights what they call “wins” for suicide prevention efforts, noting that veteran suicide rates appear to be declining. However, the headline number is grim: 6,407 veterans died by suicide in 2022, with the VA highlighting an average of 17.6 per day. To be fair, this is slightly less than the 2018 peak of 6,722 deaths, and it’s about the same as 2021’s 6,404. Using the VA’s own adjusted numbers, the overall trend in raw number suicides since 2001 is pretty much a flatline, with suicides spiking in 2008 and then hovering in the mid- to high-teens per 100,000 until 2018. This is a common phenomenon with government reporting — you see the blips smoothed out, but nothing’s actually going down. From 2001 to 2022, the VA estimates over 140,000 veterans have died by suicide in the United States. It’s a small city wiped out, and no amount of “progress” spin can soften that. But we know from real-world research that the VA’s numbers don’t come close to measuring the real problem, as Operation Deep Dive revealed that inconsistent cause of death reporting conceals over half of the nation’s veteran suicides. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

This focus on “adjusted” rates can be a problem because it distracts from what matters: the real human conditions driving the problem. The VA tends to focus on “age- and sex-adjusted” (and sometimes even “population-adjusted”) suicide rates in their reports, numbers that are tweaked for various factors to make trends look better. In the 2022 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report^[2] (published in September 2022) the VA brags about a 9.7% decline in the “age- and sex-adjusted” suicide rate from 2018 to 2020. But if you focus on raw suicide numbers and real-world trends rather than these “adjustments”, the story looks different. Yes, the adjusted rate declined, but the unadjusted number of suicides remained stubbornly near 6,400 to 6,700 per year for a long stretch—and that’s only considering suicides where the veteran left a note or the means left no doubt—totally ignoring deaths of despair like drug overdoses, single-vehicular “accidents” and enigmatic “falls from heights”—something VA reporting avoids acknowledging with impressive determination. Raw numbers dipped in 2020 (6,326) but ticked back up again in 2022 (6,407), despite all of the programs and outreach in the last decade. The VA’s reporting suggests that adjusting the rates makes their charts look better but does nothing to address the total number of deaths. Take it from an old Pentagon veteran: these are reporting games all-too common in DC. But these games are easy to see through when you know the tricks. Take for example Figure 1 below from page 2 of the VA Annual Report. Then look at Figures 2 and 3 below that show the overall trends.

Figure 1. The VA’s “Positive Trend” Spin

This list of positive trends appears up front on page 2 and would have us believe the veteran suicide rate for ages 18-34 is improving. However, the VA does not want us to see what’s really going on. Take a look at the following chart which details the data in context.

Figure 2. The Real Trend Data

The dashed line is the real trend in suicide rate for veterans aged 18-34. It is a “positive trend” all right, but not in the sense the VA wants us to believe. The rate jumped nearly 50% from 2001 to 2022, and while 2022’s rate was down from 2021, the overall trend is overwhelmingly bleak. The conclusion is clear: young veterans are killing themselves at an alarming rate with no signs of slowing down. Not to be alarmist, but the VA is just wrong for depicting this as something encouraging, and if this is the VA’s idea of “good news”, then the VA has got to be thrilled at the overall trend:

Figure 3. Comparative Suicide Rates for Veterans and Non-Veterans

The VA’s Highlight Reel: Where They’ve Claimed Some Successes

As noted, the VA tends to focus on their progress reports. A common tactic is breaking out “subpopulations” of veterans for which they can report positive outcomes, including:

• Female veterans saw a 24.1% reduction in suicide rate from 2021 to 2022.

• Veterans recently using VHA with an anxiety diagnosis saw a 35.1% suicide rate reduction from 2001 to 2022.

• Veterans recently using VHA with a depression diagnosis saw a 34.5% suicide rate reduction from 2001 to 2022.

• Veterans who reached out to the Veterans Crisis Line in 2021 had a suicide rate 22.5% lower in the month after contact than in 2019.

These are positive numbers and they shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed out-of-hand. The success stories in subgroups like women veterans or those with diagnoses are real, and the crisis hotlines and targeted programs like the Veterans Crisis Line (988, press 1) or Mission Daybreak veterans mental health initiative represent real money. Yet as the funding figures bear out, with VA spending on mental health services rising from $6.2 billion in 2012 to $9.4 billion in 2020 and the 2025 budget at $17.1 billion, we have to ask if these programs are “too big to fail”. (FYI, “mental health services” is where all of the suicide prevention dollars are going, since suicide is a mental health problem, amirite?) Then there’s the zero-cost/no-out-of-pocket-expenses crisis care at VA and non-VA facilities the VA has expanded, which they claim have helped 50,000+ veterans since 2023 (as of October 2024), though they’re not publishing results or specific success stories.

There are some big wins on the policy front, too. The 2022 PACT Act opened the VA’s books on toxic exposure-related benefits to make it easier for veterans to access long-denied healthcare, hopefully alleviating some of the toxic exposure diagnoses tied to suicide. But many of these are longer-term plays, and the data from 2001 to 2022 doesn’t show any inflection points tied to individual programs or policy changes. They may well make a difference, but the system still has problems—that’s a whole separate article for later—but while the big policies post big spending, the measurable results are unchanged in the big picture. It’s great that fewer female veterans are killing themselves, but if a male veteran suicide is added for every female suicide prevented, what are we doing here?

Focusing on certain subgroups is great, but again, those veterans are not the majority of those taking their lives. Male veterans (age-adjusted) increased their suicide rates by 1.6% from 2021 to 2022, the report notes, and the overall death count has increased from 6,326 in 2020 to 6,404 in 2021 to 6,407 in 2022. Contacts with the Veterans Crisis Line have a lower suicide rate in the month after contact by 22.5% (2021 vs. 2019) but of course that’s the month after contact and doesn’t say anything at all about their long-term effectiveness (see screenshot below). The focus on adjusted rates distracts from the overarching lack of improvement in the total suicide problem. That hasn’t gone down much over the last 10 years; it just wobbled around the 6,400-per-year level after the 2018 peak, with minor dips up and down but not a steady, consistent decline. In a decade of billions in funding, 6,400+ is not a “success,” especially when we consider the overall veteran population decrease. VA’s 2024 Annual Reports states that the veteran population has declined by about 28.4% between 2001 and 2022 (from 25.8 million to 18.5 million) due to the 2001 post-9/11 veteran boom aging into later years and smaller military recruitment since 2010. Raw numbers at the same level year after year with a steady decrease in overall population should ring alarm bells, but the VA silences those bells.

 Figure 4. Decreased Suicide for Veterans - Change in Suicide Rate First Month Post Crisis Line Contact from 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report

The Spin: Obscuring the Truth

Unadjusted suicide counts don’t show a huge decline, just a slow, uneven grind upward. Then there are the big questions, questions that raise doubts about whether the VA’s reporting is as trustworthy as they think it is. A 2022 study from America’s Warrior Partnership (AWP), an “advocacy organization dedicated to preventing veteran suicide” that includes Duke University and University of Alabama, found the “total veteran suicide” rate to be 24 per day in the U.S. in 2022. There’s a note that “Veteran suicide data provided by the CDC may be significantly underreported, by as much as two to three times,” which is a tipoff. Using the VA’s own data, the report adjusted for suicide deaths that the VA misses, such as drug overdoses, vehicular accidents, and other non-firearm deaths. AWP compared the VA’s raw suicide data from 2019 against death certificates, and by including those drug overdoses, vehicular accidents and other non-firearm deaths, they found the number had doubled, as follows:

AWP’s Operation Deep Dive initiative found that an estimated 24 former service members die by suicide per day, compared to the VA’s reported average of 17.7. Additionally, AWP estimates "approximately 20 FSMs die per day by Self-Injury Mortality (SIM)– previously listed as accidents/undetermined – over 80% are coded as overdose deaths.” Combining these gives a total of about 44 deaths per day due to suicide or self-injury, roughly 2.4 times higher than the VA’s official estimate.

“Our interim report findings estimate that approximately 24 former service members die by suicide each day, and an additional 20 die each day by self-injury mortality (largely overdose), totaling 44 deaths per day. This is 2.4 times higher than the Department of Veterans Affairs’ estimate of 17.7 veteran suicides per day.”

This means the number of veterans lost to suicide is about 2.4 times higher than the VA’s reporting. Suddenly 6,400 a year doesn’t look like so many.

Here’s the long and short of it: The VA’s suicide prevention reporting shows little progress for the system as a whole while focusing on what they’ve done well for certain populations. They can’t obfuscate the unadjusted total, which shows about 6,400 veteran suicides per year, not including the “off book” suicides where the veteran doesn’t leave a note, with little indication that that number will come down any time soon.

What’s Been Done: A Lot of Money, a Lot of Programs, No Results

The VA has spent a lot of money on mental health and suicide prevention since 2001. In 2012, their budget for suicide prevention programming was $68 million, and it had increased to $312 million by 2021. The total budget for the VA is up, too: the 2023 budget was $299.9 billion, the 2024 budget was $319.8 billion, and the 2025 budget was $400 billion, and it seems likely that these budgets will expand as our population ages and the VA rolls out more programs to take advantage of this political football. But it’s not clear how much of this is spent on suicide prevention specifically — ChatGPT will tell you it is $3.25 billion this year — other estimates suggest that spending on suicide prevention is about 20-30% of the VA’s mental health budget. That suggests a conservative average of $8 billion per year in VA mental health spending over the 23 years between 2001 and 2024, or about $184 billion total, with an estimated $37 to $55 billion of that budget going to suicide prevention and mental health programs aimed at prevention over that time.

These conservative estimates of $37 to $55 billion spent on veteran suicide prevention, “mental health”, and related efforts since 2001 don’t include ancillary programs like the PACT Act. One can also make an argument that it was much higher than that — that a more realistic estimate might be $100 billion or more — if you include the “mental health” and broader appropriations from the PACT Act benefits rolled out in the last few years.

The key point: that’s a ton of money. Tens of billions or more over two decades spent on programs that show few results in the grand scheme of things, on programs that have pushed the overall veteran suicide count only fractionally lower from a multi-decade average of 6,000+ per year. In the end, the best we can say is the VA spent the GDP of a European country like Estonia to manage the growth of the veteran suicide rate. Is that good news? The VA would have us believe this is progress and things are working. To a seasoned researcher, that conclusion is absurd. The numbers reveal an absolute disaster for the stated objectives and suggest the real agenda can’t really be aligned with the logic. We can’t conclude if there is Big Pharma corruption, political corruption, or an amalgamation of corruption, but there is simply no way any reasonable person looks at the data and finds the VA is doing a good job at helping veterans avoid suicide.

The VA boasts of their policies that would supposedly streamline toxic exposure-related medical benefits for VA healthcare, including mental health care. But their own numbers show no clear changes or inflection points associated with that law; most of their changes have been more subtle and gradual over the last decade. That’s not to say that they haven’t made a difference — clearly they have for those veterans they’re reaching or for whom they’ve expanded programs and benefits. But the VA is notoriously bureaucratic and has a spotty history of reaching veterans where they are and getting them care, from long wait times and understaffed clinics to a dearth of resources in rural areas.

The VA’s spin on veteran suicide prevention tries to paint a picture of progress, but the data don’t support their success story. The raw number of deaths hovers around 6,400 per year, down only slightly from the peak of 6,722 in 2018, and the more important fact is that the trend has not been consistently downward, let alone downward in a significant or meaningful way. The VA’s progress is limited, their spin obfuscates the reality of the situation, and the crisis will not end until we stop ignoring the issues that are not working and start paying attention to the tools that are.

Does it mean the VA’s advertised progress isn’t real? Exactly—it is a cultivated image of progress disguising an even bigger problem. Are targeted programs and hotlines saving lives? Not in total, with some effects for certain populations. But here’s the point: the crisis will not end until we stop paying attention to the shiny spin reports from the VA and start focusing on the areas where our suicide prevention efforts have proven not to work.

Veteran Suicide Prevention: A Crisis That Still Isn’t Going Away

The VA has spent nearly a century on veteran mental health, with over 2,000 lobotomies performed on veterans after World War 2^[3],[4]. Between 2015 and 2019, the VA spent $2,414,495,320 on psychotropic drugs, with 4.2 million vets taking these in 2019.^[5] That’s a stellar record of wreckage. Since 2001, the VA has doled out billions of dollars on suicide prevention programs and released reports each year trumpeting “progress” in their efforts. The trouble is, when you read between the lines, between the DC doublespeak, the situation is still a mess, and their numbers show the VA’s progress hasn’t been real. The raw data, without all the adjustments for rates or veteran subgroups where they can claim a “win” for suicide prevention, tells a story: the veteran suicide crisis is just as bad as it was 10, 20, or 25 years ago.

Don’t forget the outside numbers from AWP. It suggests we’re averaging 44 suicides per day over two decades for a total of 385,000+ veterans dead by their own hands since 2001. That means we lost the equivalent of the population of Cleveland, Ohio. Is that good news for how we’re treating America’s warriors? The VA’s “wins” are focused on limited populations (female, younger, mental health) that make for good headlines, but it amounts to whistling past a massive graveyard that is only going to get bigger.

If we’re losing 16,000+ veterans per year despite a decade of nine-figure budgets, we clearly haven’t got it right. If you give the VA and related programs like the Department of Defense credit for the good news (female, younger vets, those with mental health conditions), you also have to concede that they haven’t reached or helped the vast majority of those who take their own lives: white, male veterans over 30 who are not receiving care or whose conditions are not being diagnosed. There are legitimate public health and mental health challenges preventing some veterans from getting the care they need — the VA has bureaucratic red tape, the VA is understaffed, the VA can be a mess to navigate. If that were the case, you would think that despite the improvements in targeted groups, the suicide rate would be dropping in other groups as well.

The VA’s annual suicide prevention progress reports say a lot, but they don’t show it: The crisis is still with us, and it still takes veteran lives each and every day. The VA likes to focus on their success with low-hanging fruit in a forest where the vast majority of veterans who take their lives are men over 30. Focus on the numbers: overall, the VA’s progress in preventing suicides has not been real. The unadjusted, raw total has not budged in the last decade, and the long-term trend shows the country is no closer to solving this problem than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

The VA has spent money, time, and resources on this, and it hasn’t helped. They say they’re succeeding at suicide prevention because their death counts are lower or declining among certain groups, but that’s cherry-picking; it also fails to show that overall the problem is still as bad or worse. They’ve put money into better hotlines, expanded care, no-cost visits, and easier telehealth access, but it’s no use if veterans are not getting these services. Streamlined access and easier routes to care will be a big part of the next phase of this; some of the progress with certain subgroups suggests it can work, but we’re still in the data-dodging years, not the solution phase.

It doesn’t appear that the VA or DoD are suddenly going to transform the way they work or where they spend their money, but I do think we have to start paying attention to the broader picture: that despite the new focus on the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention in Action, the VA’s problem is no better than it was before they started spinning the crisis in their own favor. The crisis will end when we demand a different result, and to demand a different result, we need to look at the data rather than listening to the spin.

In the meantime, perhaps consider that WHC has it right – veteran suicide is not due to mental illness – as a matter of fact, the brain is working exactly as designed for survival in crisis. The solution is not tied to better drugs and better therapies. The answer lies in the community understanding its veterans and what challenges those local veterans are facing. The answer lies in building resources and relationships addressing those needs, so that veterans are pulled into community, instead of pushed out to isolation. Here’s a hint: current treatments are misguided – the pathology is missing.

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^[1] U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Suicide Prevention, 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report: Part 2 of 2 – Report Findings (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, December 2024), accessed September 2, 2025, https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2024/2024-Annual-Report-Part-2-of-2_508.pdf.

^[2] U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, 2022 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2022), accessed September 2, 2025, https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2022/2022-National-Veteran-Suicide-Prevention-Annual-Report-FINAL-508.pdf..

^[3] Carol Schultz Vento, “Treatment of War-Related Psychiatric Injuries Post World War II,” Defense Media Network, February 15, 2012, https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/treatment-war-related-psychiatric-injuries-post-world-war-ii/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

^[4] “The ‘forgotten’ lobotomies on World War II vets,” PBS NewsHour, December 11, 2013, accessed September 2, 2025,https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-forgotten-lobotomies-on-world-war-ii-vets?utm_source=chatgpt.com

^[5] “CCHR’s FOIA Request to Veterans Health Administration Reveals 4.2 Million Vets Prescribed Dangerous Drugs, Costing $2.4 Billion,” CCHR International, September 13, 2021, accessed September 2, 2025, https://www.cchrint.org/2021/09/13/cchrs-foia-request-to-veteran-health-administration-reveals-4-2-million-vets-prescribed-dangerous-drugs-costing-2-4-billion/