Suicide Toll Fuels Worry That Army Is Strained

There is no amount of money they can spend on PTSD unless they start to understand what is already known and begin to ask the right questions.

They research books, study someone an hour or so here and there. We study PTSD but above all, we live with them. We've watched them change over the years. We knew them before they went and soon discovered we met a stranger at the welcome home ceremony. We hear their voices when the nightmares come. We see them sitting in the room but being thousands of miles away, even years away from where they sit. They are not numbers to us. They are people we love.

Ask Vietnam veterans' wives what is needed to save their lives and chances are, they had to ask themselves the same question years ago when research was new, help was scarce and hope was dissolving. Some of us walked away because we didn't understand. Others stayed, living miserable lives because they were fighting the wrong battles and looking for impossible resolution. Most of us decided to learn and fight as hard as they did to stay alive in Vietnam. This was not a research project to us. Nothing we could close at the end of the day to return to our own "normal" lives. This was and is our life.

Why isn't anyone asking the wives of Vietnam veterans what they did to save the lives of their veterans? Why isn't anyone asking us to help the newer spouses learn how to do what we had to learn on our own? Why isn't the government asking us what cannot be learned from pages in books or treating a veteran that is less than truthful to them?

If they really want to save the lives of the troops and our veterans, they are asking the wrong questions to the wrong people and believing the wrong answers. It's not that we can replace psychologists or psychiatrists. We need more of them to help our families. But what we can do is help them do their jobs better because we know them better. We live with them and this is our life.

Suicide Toll Fuels Worry That Army Is Strained

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN
Sixteen American soldiers killed themselves in October in the U.S. and on duty overseas, an unusually high monthly toll that is fueling concerns about the mental health of the nation's military personnel after more than eight years of continuous warfare.

The Army's top generals worry that surging tens of thousands more troops into Afghanistan could increase the strain felt by many military personnel after years of repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The October suicide figures mean that at least 134 active-duty soldiers have taken their own lives so far this year, putting the Army on pace to break last year's record of 140 active-duty suicides. The number of Army suicides has risen 37% since 2006, and last year, the suicide rate surpassed that of the U.S. population for the first time.

Army officials say the strain of repeated deployments with minimal time back in the U.S. is one of the biggest factors fueling the rise in military suicides.

The Army hit a grim milestone last year when the suicide rate exceeded that of the general population for the first time: 20.2 per 100,000 people in the military, compared with the civilian rate of 19.5 per 100,000. The Army's suicide rate was 12.7 per 100,000 in 2005, 15.3 in 2006 and 16.8 in 2007.

In response, the Army has launched a broad push to better understand military suicide and develop new ways of preventing it. In August, the Army and the National Institute of Mental Health said they would conduct a five-year, $50 million effort to better identify the factors that cause some soldiers to take their own lives.

Suicide Toll Fuels Worry That Army Is Strained