Really Support the Troops

1 February 2008



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US Military Suicides Hit Record Levels

Dana Priest of the Washington Post, along with Anne Hull, had a story in yesterday’s edition that makes depressing reading regardless of what position one takes on the war in Iraq-Nam. She got hold of a “draft internal study” on suicides among active-duty soldiers, figures for which the Pentagon has kept since 1980. In 2007, 121 soldiers killed themselves, up 20% from 2006 and the kind of record no one wanted set.

Of course, that 121 is only the number of suicide attempts that resulted in death. According to the “US Army Medical Command Suicide Prevention Action Plan” cited in the Post, about 2,100 soldiers attempted suicide or injured themselves deliberately last year. In 2002, that number was just 350. Moreover, the historical trend has been that suicides by active personnel drop when soldiers are in combat zones overseas. Yet that trend has changed over the last few years. In 2001, the Army had a suicide rate of 9.8 per 100,000 (a record low), and in 2006, it hit 17.5 per 100,000. Twice as many suicides occurred in the US last year as in Iraq-Nam and Afghanistan combined.

In Monday night’s rather lame State of the Union address, President Bush said America should “improve the system of care for our wounded warriors and help them build lives of hope and promise and dignity.” Some wounds are to the psyche, and the study the Post reporters covered says point blank “the current Army Suicide Prevention Program was not originally designed for a combat/deployment environment.”

The Army knows it has a problem, and it is taking measures that pass the common sense test. Citing Colonel Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, the Army’s top psychiatrist and author of the study, the Post also says, “the Army has reinvigorated its efforts to understand mental health issues and has instituted new assessment surveys and new online videos and questionnaires to help soldiers recognize problems and become more resilient . . . . It has also hired more mental health providers. The plan calls for attaching more chaplains to deployed units and assigning ‘battle buddies’ to improve peer support and monitoring.”

David Rudd, ex-Army psychologist and chairman of the psychology department at Texas Tech, told the Post that the increase in suicides raises “real questions about whether you can have an Army this size with multiple deployments.” Clearly, one can’t. So, note to the next president, don’t do it. Also, make sure the soldiers with wounds on the inside get treated just like those with wounds on the outside. The country owes it to them.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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