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Friday, March 18, 2011

Female soldiers' suicide rate triples when at war

Female soldiers' suicide rate triples when at war
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
The suicide rate for female soldiers triples when they go to war, according to the first round of preliminary data from an Army study.

The findings, released to USA TODAY this week, show that the suicide rate rises from five per 100,000 to 15 per 100,000 among female soldiers at war. Scientists are not sure why but say they will look into whether women feel isolated in a male-dominated war zone or suffer greater anxieties about leaving behind children and other loved ones.

Even so, the suicide risk for female soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan is still lower than for men serving next to them, the $50 million study says.

Findings also show that marriage somehow helps inoculate male and female soldiers from killing themselves while they are overseas. Although these death rates among GI's who are single or divorced double when they go to war, the rate among married soldiers does not increase, according to the study.

Scientists say they hope these and other findings will help them tease out protective social patterns — such as, for example, that sense in a marriage of mattering to someone else — that can be encouraged or instilled in all soldiers to lower the risk of suicide.

"One of the big things we're interested in now is digging into this marriage thing and saying, 'What is it you get, by being married? And how could we put it in a bottle so we can give it to everybody, whether or not they're married?" says Ronald Kessler, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who is working on the project.
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Female soldiers' suicide rate triples when at war

2 comments:

  1. I was sent the address to this site by a friend. I am the wife of a British soldier. I was finding it very hard to cope with his mood swings and the long silences on his return from operations when a friend recomended reading a book entitled "From the corners of a wounded mind" writen by Theodore Knell, a former Special Forces Soldier about his combat experiences and how it had effected him and his relationship with his family, it allowed me to better understand my husband and the things he had been through and what was happening to him now. Soldiers are not the best at sharing their feelings regardless of their gender, if you are the wife, girlfriend or family member of a soldier who has recently returned or is returning shortly, you could do a lot worse than read this very powerful book.

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  2. Thank you for sharing that. You could also read my book, online for free. For the Love of Jack, is about 18 years of our life together with PTSD. My husband is a Vietnam vet and I wrote the book to help families understand it. One of the benefits of listening to older veterans and their families is we can make it easier for the newer ones because we've been through hell and back, learned from mistake, but the blessing is, we are living proof you can make it too.
    You can find my book on the link on the side bar of this blog. We're heading into 30 years together now. We met in 1982.

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