How HumanWorks™ Addresses What the Veteran Suicide Prevention Landscape Cannot

Executive summary — the full report is available on request

More than $3 billion in annual public and private investment goes toward preventing veteran suicide. That investment is not the problem. The architecture of the investment is.

Six structural gaps run through the entire veteran suicide prevention landscape, and no organization currently documented is built to close them:

• No organization specifically targets the first-year post-separation window, despite a veteran suicide rate of 46.2 per 100,000 during that period.

• Identity loss and loss of purpose, which account for over half the variance in suicide risk among recently separated veterans, are not a primary program target anywhere in the landscape.

• 61 percent of veterans who died by suicide in 2023 had no contact with VA care in the prior year. The largest share of the at-risk population is not inside the systems built to reach them.

• The veteran who does not yet know they are struggling, the one most likely to die before ever identifying as someone who needs help, is not being systematically reached by any program.

• Federal grant architecture funds response to crisis, not prevention at the level of identity and meaning.

• The Unwitnessed Experience, the condition of carrying a service identity that no institution in the civilian world can see or validate, is not named or addressed as a structural risk factor anywhere in the landscape.

The HumanWorks™ Model was built, by research and by design, to operate in exactly those gaps. This is not a claim that HumanWorks™ replaces crisis infrastructure, clinical systems, or the community organizations already doing this work. Those systems are necessary. This is a claim that they are not sufficient. The human experience of leaving a dominant system, the destruction and reconstruction of identity, purpose, belonging, and agency that military separation requires, happens upstream of crisis. It happens in the silence before the 988 call. HumanWorks™ is built for that silence.

The full report details the research foundation behind this claim, including the 2018 Pepperdine thesis that identified the mechanism of harm as structural collapse rather than depression, PTSD, or substance use on its own, and walks through how each element of the HumanWorks™ architecture, the Seven-Layer Fear Architecture, the Language of Permission Model, the Belonging Pathway, and the Unwitnessed Experience, maps directly onto a gap the current landscape cannot close.

Request the Full Report

Sources

• McNamara, S.B. (2018). Shifting Personal Agency During Transition from Military to Civilian Workforce. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Pepperdine University, n=131.

• David, S. (2016). Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. Avery.

• Deci, E.L. & Ryan, R.M. Self-Determination Theory, on autonomy, competence, and relatedness as universal human needs.

• Rock, D. SCARF Model, on the neuroscience of social threat (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness).

• Bridges, W. (1980). Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. Addison-Wesley.

• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy theory, on agency restoration.

• Bowlby, J. Attachment theory, on the relational disruption of identity-bearing institutional separation.

• Edmondson, A. Psychological safety research, on permission structures within systems.

We build the architecture for what most change models skip: the human.

Sara B. McNamara, MSOD Founder, HumanWorks™ Solutions