'Be the One … has been a guiding light'

Indiana Legionnaire Tracy Levay has attempted to die by suicide three times. The adjutant of Frank & Edward Skwiat American Legion Post 451 in Michigan City, she made those choices following the ending of a 16-year marriage and a breast cancer scare. She’s also lost a close friend and fellow veteran to suicide, as well as a stepson.

But on April 4, Levay was in Indianapolis for the Department of Indiana’s Legion College, where she is an alumni and moderator. Included in the college’s curriculum was a Be the One training session – something that now resonates deeply with Levay.

“Suicide is a permanent solution to a tiny problem that is aspirated with thoughts of you can’t get through it,” said Levay, a U.S. Navy veteran and Indiana’s Third District commander. “So Be the One, for me, has been a guiding light. It’s made me reach out to people. I’m not afraid to talk about my suicidal events. I’m not afraid to talk about how suicide has affected me. But it’s not easy. It’s an everyday struggle to this day.”

At the Marriott East in Indianapolis, around 40 Department of Indiana Legionnaires took part in the “Saving Lives of Veterans, their Families, and Communities with the Columbia Protocol”. A similar in-person training session took place during the Legion’s annual Washington Conference, but this was the first time an American Legion department had staged the Columbia Protocol training.

Levay said she’s proud of the Legion for making preventing veteran suicide its top priority. “For me, it’s great to see. It’s so important for us as Legionnaires to help out our fellow veterans and get them the help they absolutely, 100-percent need,” she said. “We know what it’s like to serve in the military. And a lot of the outside people don’t. Suicide is one of the top things killing our veterans. For me, to see The American Legion take this step and go further with protecting the ones who protect this country means a lot to me.”

Levay said having a program like Be the One around when she had her thoughts of suicide could have made a difference “because I probably would have gotten help a lot sooner.”

Be the One also has made an impact on U.S. Marine Corps veteran Tony Cross, who serves as Be the One’s program manager.

“When you get this training, you’re going to start thinking differently. I know, because I do,” Cross told the Legion College students. “I pay a lot more attention to things that people say. You don’t have to have mental illness to want to kill yourself.”

Cross said Be the One is “a golden opportunity to change the face of The American Legion. We have 12,103 posts in the country. The most relevant time in our history is right now. When you say you’re going to do the mission, there’s what we call the forward edge of the battle area. When you cross that line, you’re in operations. We’ve now crossed that line.”

The Be the One training, “Saving Lives of Veterans, their Families, and Communities with the Columbia Protocol,” was developed by the Columbia Lighthouse Project and uses the Columbia Protocol, a screening tool developed in 2007 by Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pittsburgh and supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.

The Columbia Protocol, also known as the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale, supports suicide risk assessment through a series of simple, plain-language questions that anyone can ask. The answers help users identify whether someone is at risk for suicide, assess the severity and immediacy of that risk, and gauge the level of support that the person needs.

The questions are:

·         “Have you wished you were dead or wished you could go to sleep and not wake up?”

·         “Have you actually had any thoughts about killing yourself?”

If yes, ask the following questions:

·         Have you been thinking about how you might do this?

·         Have you had these thoughts and had some intention of acting on them?

·         Have you started to work out or have you worked out the details of how to kill yourself? Did you intend to carry out this plan?

And always ask “Have you done anything, started to do anything or prepared to do anything to end your life?”

Providing the training were two individuals with extensive suicide prevention experience. Wendy Lakso has served as chief of the U.S. Army’s Suicide Prevention Program; deputy executive director of the Office of the U.S. President’s PREVENTS Task Force, which is a part of the National Strategy for Preventing Veteran Suicide; and, more recently, director of partnerships in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention from 2018-2020.

Fellow facilitator Dr. Keita Franklin has addressed the Legion’s Veterans Affairs & Rehabilitation Commission while serving as the senior executive director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention. She held a similar position with the Department of Defense and is co-director of the Columbia Lighthouse Project.

The pair stressed that someone doesn’t need to be a clinician to prevent a suicide or provide a suicide intervention. They also pointed out several other misconceptions, including:

·         Owning a firearm is not associated with suicide risk. Lakso said 70 percent of veterans who die by suicide do so using a firearm. And statistics show if someone is planning suicide with a firearm but a firearm isn’t available, they don’t look for substitute method.

·         Suicide isn’t impulsive. Traumatic live events can trigger thoughts of suicide, with statistics showing that 25-40 percent of suicides happen within five minutes between the thinking of and acting on suicidal thoughts. Seventy percent happen within an hour.

·         Talking with someone about suicide will encourage suicide. Talking with someone about suicide provides an intervention for the person considering taking his or her own life. It shows that person that someone cares, with often is what they need at that point.

·         A majority of veterans who die by suicide have a mental health illness. Statistics show 50.8 percent of veterans who die by suicide did not have a mental health diagnosis.

The training provided the opportunity for some heartfelt back and forth between the Legion College students and the facilitators. One Legionnaire said his father died by suicide and that he himself was a survivor of a murder-suicide attempt. Having also had suicidal thoughts, he’s developed what he calls lifelines – positive events and relationships in his life, or as Franklin called it, “reasons for living” – when having those feelings.

“My father didn’t have those lifelines,” he said. “With all of my lifelines, I can take a lot more of that stress because I’ve got protection. I can talk to people.”

Another Legionnaire talked about the importance of the Legion in providing an extended family, “Because we have shared experiences, shared dangers, shared suffering, across multiple generations, different (military) branches. When you share that type of bond with people, that can be stronger than family.”

Wayne Zeman, Indiana’s Northern Vice Commander, echoed that sentiment, “We, as fellow veterans, have a unique ability to relate to one another,” he said. “And the people who need help sometimes, they won’t go to a clinician. They won’t go to VA mental health, because of the likelihood they’re going to end up talking to somebody who has no frame of reference, who has no shared experiences, who isn’t going to understand. So they would rather talk to one of us.”

Kelly Murray, the adjutant of Post 11 in Lafayette and an Indiana Legion College facilitator and its speaker, said it made sense for the college to provide the training.

“We’re lucky enough to have those resources close by, and we felt we needed to take advantage of that. They were ready to launch, and we were ready to go. And the timing was perfect.

“It’s such an important mission. We didn’t want to miss this opportunity to not only provide this education for our students that are in this class, but to also do the live session.”

Murray sat through the training and called it “intense. There were a lot of people in this organization and in this room that have very personal stories about this, It’s hard to sit and think about what other people in this room might be thinking about at this moment.”

Seeing The American Legion take up Be the One as its top mission has given Murray “an immense sense of pride knowing that we have identified something so relevant to veterans of all ages and of all experiences, and are able to hopefully make a difference. Our ideas are to change lives and to save lives. That’s why we were in the military, and that’s what we continue to do.”

The American Legion continues to offer virtual Be the One training using the Columbia protocol. Click here for a schedule of upcoming sessions.