While most of us will be spending Thanksgiving with our loved ones next week, there are already 140 Army families who will not be spending this year celebrating their time together. Instead, those families will be mourning the loss of one of their own, due to suicide. With 140 suicides already on the books amongst Army families, 2009 is going to the be a record-breaking year for the Army, but not in a way they would like anyone to notice. 2009 will mark the year that the Army has suffered the highest suicide rate ever.
So what does the Army do? Does it recognize the significance of this number with a solemn, sincere statement? No, instead it turns on the full denial PR machine:
“We are almost certainly going to end the year higher than last year,” General Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff, told a Pentagon briefing.
“This is horrible, and I do not want to downplay the significance of these numbers in any way.” [...]
Chiarelli cautioned against generalizing about the causes of the suicides, or assuming links to combat stress on forces stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So in one breath, General Chiarelli says he doesn’t want to downplay the significance of these numbers. In the next, he says we can’t generalize these numbers to any actual military combat missions that soldiers may be actively involved in. Huh?
With all due respect, perhaps General Chiarelli needs to take a course in logic or read more of the prior reports released about this increasing problem within the U.S. military. To not connect the dots between the never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (did no one study military history and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan?) is to be in a state of irrational and delusional denial. Sorry, General, but such statements make you sorely out of touch with your people and reality.
When you’re threatening court martial to moms who can’t find child care for their 10-month old before deployment and have psychiatrists shooting up your training bases because you don’t acknowledge the inherent conflicts in service amongst your ranks (or your officers don’t have the stomach to discharge someone they clearly saw as problematic), then yes, you have some serious problems. And yes, they are related to the two wars you are currently fighting.
As the article notes, the military’s suicide rate among active-duty soldiers was about 20 per 100,000, nearly double the national U.S. rate of 11.1 suicides per 100,000 people.
There is something significantly wrong there if twice as many people in your service are taking their own lives. This hasn’t always been the case. And rather than trying to whitewash the issue, you should be pulling out all the stops — and all significantly increasing the funding — to figure out how to stop the blood letting.
Read the full article: Army suicides set to hit new high in 2009
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Links to This Article
Blood Letting - Plasma Pool (11/18/2009)
10 Comments to
“2009 Army Suicides: Highest Ever”
As someone familiar with life in the military (including a combat tour), I can attest to the fact that it can be stressful. However, I think it’s important not to just blame the wars. I am particularly offended by referencing Nadal Hasan’s act of terrorism as a consequence of poor Army policy. He is a murderer and if any of the soldiers he worked with – particularly his fellow officers and mental health professionals – had been able to see that coming, of course they would have done something to prevent that.
The problem is, and always has been, that suicide has an extremely low base rate (even at these highest levels seen in the Army) and is therefore extremely difficult to predict. The rate of suicide is devastatingly high and I hope that researchers and clinicians can come up with a way to stop (and reverse) the rising rate. A couple important facts to consider as well when interpreting the data. One is that the suicide rates in the general population are very similar to the Army rates when similar demographics are used (young adult males). Two is that many (I don’t know the exact numbers) of the completed suicides have been by soldiers who have never seen combat.
I do not want to make excuses and I certainly don’t want to seem to be part of the “full denial PR machine” but I also don’t want to naively rely on statistics thrown about without the proper context.
these people decided to join the military, and then they decided to kill themselves. there’s always someone or something else to blame, but if decision #1 is proven to lead to decision #2 then it comes down to the person making decision #1.
I highly suggest reading the articles I link to before commenting, as they often clarify why I write from the perspective I do. The article I linked to here, the Reuters news report on the statistic, noted that 1/3 of those who commit suicide in the Army have never “been deployed abroad.” Which suggests that, even at home, they aren’t doing a very job for screening for suicide (which is an easy screen to do).
As for Army stress and Hasan, again, the original article made the connection and I was just elaborating on it. The two are connected because of the Army culture — one that still doesn’t completely recognize the legitimacy of mental disorders and the negative impact of stress, and tries to sweep concerns under the rug.
ok, i’ll try to read articles before commenting. i think the army takes negative press seriously and that one guy having to stand up and issue a statement about it wasn’t enjoying his day.
a mental disorder isn’t always present and observable. a healthy person joining the army might have a change in mental health a few months after joining. and the japanese commit suicide at a higher rate than our army. so i’m not going to say that i think the army isn’t trying. increased suicide rates would be hard to prevent, and i think people who join and can’t handle it are normal people who made awful decisions.
it is actually a tricky thing to say it’s the highest ever–
it is certainly the highest ever reported.
as we live in a world where many crimes are not reported i cannot draw this conclusion. the stigma from addressing mental health issues has lifted somewhat. also during previous wars, such suicide reports would be perceived by those who control the distribution of information for publication to fly in the face of the national security needs of the usa.
my own analyst, who is quite old and a professor of psychiatry on the east coast, worked at a base in massachussets that housed army military intelligence. he was not allowed to publish what he considered an important study about the suicides of army war-brides on bases after world war 2.
i recognize that i am only offering unsupported anecdotal evidence to dispute your well considered remarks. but you might surmise that my own paranoia leads me to believe that this is the only kind of evidence which can be mustered in such circumstances.
in criminological terms, when there is a higher incidence of reported rapes in urban areas, it sometimes means that more women who were exploited now have the courage to come forward about it.
I am sure there were what was perceived as practical reasons to misrepresent military suicide in the past reportage. these reasons may include the morale of those still living, continuing the pensions of military spouses, the underlying failure of mental health administration in the military to control such a problem might in itself be a cause for information suppression.
i am not trying to take the wind out of your sails. we must address this uncomfortable problem and help these suffering servicemen and women.
This just shows how much stress and pressure these wars have put on our troops: http://tinyurl.com/yzn5epm We must work on some more rigorous screening methods and preventative measures during their training times. I never thought these wars were a good idea. Now it is taking its toll on our service men and women.
I’m not defending or disputing the Army. I want to share my own personal experiences in regard to my personal mental health when I served in the military.
Some years ago, it was one of my military comrades who first noticed my initial depression. I had it for months but did not know; if it wasn’t for this non-medical coworker/superior who recognized my symptoms, who knows when I would have sought treatment. The support offered throughout my ordeal was over the top in comparison with the level of support received in terms of civilian jobs I have held. I can’t say it was absent from stigma and other issues, but to compare….
I had the best mental health medical care through the military–by far. No 10 minute appointments. Competent and empathetic doctors and nurses took the time to get to know me and did all they could to provide me with support.
With military health care, I never felt like a took a deli ticket from one of those deli counter red machines to see a doctor like I have felt with civilian physicians. The military medical staff were personal. To this day, I look back and wish everyone could get that level of care.
The military has routine awareness training to address mental health issues, and to reduce the stigma and encourage members to seek support. And there is plenty of support-unlike the civilian counterparts I’ve worked for. I hope this exists in corporations, but I have not yet seen it. The military allows you the support and time off you need to get well again and even welcomes you back when the time is right. Substantially more support than any civilian employer ever offered me since my reoccurrences, since I left the military. So much for “government run” health care…
I was in a branch other than the Army-I have heard and have seen for myself the Army does not take care of its own so well at times. But that is only antecdotal glimpses I’ve seen or heard about the Army culture-which, like other service branches, originates from the policies of top leadership.
There are reasons why people are killing themselves in the military, and there are things that can be done to reduce the rate of suicide.
Our senior officers have instituted (or updated) more than 160 measures (policies, regulations, requirements, etc.) that address what our commanders must do to address this problem.
There is another step that can be taken, and I address it in my book.
Anyone else notice how this site is continually used to promote individual website traffic, books, and businesses?
Findingmyself – it would be nice if you could share with us the reasons you attribute to military suicides and what could be done, elaborating upon what you briefly mentioned in your comment..I think your input would be helpful to this discussion. Thanks.
Commenters are welcomed to link to their sites or whatever, as long as their comment isn’t intended solely to market or advertise their product. Our spam filters and manual interventions delete hundreds of comments every day that are nothing more than pure spam; it’s an endless task that virtually any popular blog faces.
And indeed, sometimes we do talk about books and other things we think will help people — that’s a part of what we do here.
Join the Conversation! Post a Comment:
Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 17 Nov 2009
