US army suicides hit 26-year high

[frigidmagi]

BBC

At least 99 American soldiers killed themselves last year, the US army's highest suicide rate in 26 years, according to a new report.

The rate of 17.3 suicides per 100,000 soldiers compares with 12.8 in 2005, officials said.

Twenty-eight of the soldiers who took their own life last year did so while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The army listed failed relationships, legal and financial issues and work stress as factors behind the suicides.

Two soldiers' deaths from last year are still being investigated. If confirmed as suicide, the figure for 2006 will climb to 101.

The highest number recorded was 102 in 1991, the year of the Gulf War - but more soldiers were on active duty then, meaning the rate per 100,000 soldiers was lower than in 2006.

So far this year, 44 soldiers have taken their own lives, 17 of them while deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Mental health care

The report said there was "limited evidence" to support the suspicion that repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan were putting more servicemen and women at risk of suicide.

Its authors found a significant relationship between suicide attempts and the length of time soldiers spent in Iraq, Afghanistan or in nearby countries in operations supporting those wars.

A study published in March this year found a quarter of US veterans treated at veterans' health centres after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffered mental health problems.

The most frequent diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder, but anxiety, depression and substance-use also counted as mental health problems.

Other studies have found that the US military's mental health care resources have not been adequate for the large numbers of servicemen and women needing help as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue.

The US army has revised training programmes and is doing more to prevent suicides, the Associated Press news agency says.

It has also recruited more psychiatrists and other mental health professionals and is encouraging soldiers to recognise their own problems and seek help without fear of stigma.

[LadyTevar]

I have to wonder if the rotation in and out of combat is one of the causes of the stress on the soldier. In other wars, like Vietnam, like WWII, were the soldiers rotated back home like this?

[frigidmagi]

In other wars, like Vietnam, like WWII, were the soldiers rotated back home like this?

In Vietnam troops tended to serve a limited term within the country. It's off the top of my head but I think the tour of duty in Vietnam was one year. As for WWII most of the time combat troops did not return to the US (due to the logistic costs of it all, there were almost 3 million men in Europe alone) but did tend to get to sent to rearward rest areas and what not, but as far has I know they remained in theater until the end of the war for the most part.

Of course to be blunt a set piece war like World War II while stressful and deadly isn't as... grinding on the mind as anti-insurgent operations. In WWII the enemy was well defined and visible, not to mention the end of the war was well spelled out. We would win when the enemy governments were taken down and replaced. Also it was felt that society as a whole was with the troops, civilian society was making visible open sacrifices to support the war effort, economics aside such actions are psychologically helpful to front liners making them feel less isolated from their homes and families.

In Iraq and Afghan the enemy is hidden in the civilian population, invisible for much of the time and especially in Iraq where the enemy is made up of several competing groups ill defined and amorphous. Groups that were enemies last year are now allies and vice versa. And just because someone is shooting at someone you hate doesn't mean he won't shoot at you. This has led to mindsets summed up in the phrase,

"Be polite, be courteous and have a plan to kill everyone you meet."

The mindset required for that is alien to the typical western experience at least as far as I know. Contributing to the isolation is the fact that the war is treated like a political football more often used to gain "points" then actual concern for winning it among the politicos and the fact that the average American is not doing much of anything either way to support or hinder war (I don't consider this his/her fault, it is the government's responsibility to show citizens how, when and why they should do so and ours has completely and totally failed on this front).

This tends to mean that comparsions between WWII and Iraq are not very valid.

This means veterans and solders/Marines of this war tend to feel more isolated from society (consider the protest in D.C by vets where they engaged in a 'foot patrol' due to feeling that average Americans didn't give a damn about the war, Nitram posted the story here) tend to experience greater prolonged stress in the field and less time to decompress off of it.

That being said the suicide rate if fairly low in total numbers.