Reducing Suicide Among Veterans Requires Shared Vigilance

Reducing Suicide Among Veterans Requires Shared Vigilance
Published Sunday, September 4, 2011 2:15 am
by Dennis Maley
Today marks the start of National Suicide Prevention Week. For anyone who has ever had to confront the complex emotional web of sorrow that accompanies losing a loved one by that person's own hand, I need not speak of the pain and difficulty involved. Increasingly, a large portion of Americans lost to this unfortunate act are coming from one place – the ranks of those who have served in our nation's military.

For the past two years, more U.S. soldiers have been lost to suicide than to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even on a superficial level, this is incomprehensible. Machine gun fire, improvised explosive devices, mortar rockets, surface to air missiles, grenades, etc., yet statistically, the most likely way one of our soldiers will meet their end is by taking their own life, giving up their very existence rather than endure the torturous reality that is their every waking hour and goes on to haunt their sporadic sleep.

This epidemic has finally been acknowledged, however slowly. Studies have not been able to clearly determine precisely what factors lead to increased likelihood . Numbers have not proven whether more deployments heighten risk or diminish it. But they do shed light on the stark volume in a way that calls attention to the entire warfare culture and indicts it on still another level.


20 percent of U.S. suicides are said to be committed by veterans, though they make up just over 8 percent of the population. Over the past five years of intense military deployment in multiple theaters, the Pentagon says that hospitalization of soldiers for suicidal thoughts has skyrocketed 7,000 percent. This is at least somewhat owed to an improving atmosphere, in which it is more accepted to express such problems, and the onus to direct soldiers toward treatment has thankfully grown.
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