Military suicides 40% higher than last year

Yesterday I wrote Combat PTSD, the hard fall of the survivor for this very reason. When you have programs that have been "provided" by the military but do more harm than good, the proof is in the reality of numbers. Numbers do not lie. They do not spin. If the "resiliency" approach worked, the numbers would have gone down year after year and not up. As bad as the successful number of suicides is, the number of attempted suicides has gone up as well. Suicide prevention programs have been up and running for years but still these numbers go up. Group after group has shown up online "offering support" for combat veterans that have apparently not worked enough to drive down the number of veterans committing suicide.

Chief Roy: Suicide rate in 2012 is worrisome

By Markeshia Ricks - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Apr 5, 2012

The number of Air Force military and civilian personnel who have committed suicide this year is up 40 percent from the same time last year, according to the service’s top noncommissioned officer.

Chief Master Sgt. James Roy, who was guest speaker for an Air Force Association lecture series, said among all Air Force military and civilian personnel there have been 35 suicides in the first quarter of the year, compared with 25 during the same time last year.

More Air Force personnel have died by suicide this year than the combined total of personnel who have died by accident or through combat, according to Roy.
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This video is from November 2011 and shows that no matter how long they've been talking about military suicides, what they are doing is not working.

450,000 calls into suicide prevention hotline yet the number of veterans committing suicide has not gone down!

LOSING THE BATTLE: THE CHALLENGE OF MILITARY SUICIDE CNASdc on Nov 2, 2011

According to the report, Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide, "Suicide among service members and veterans challenges the health of America's all-volunteer force." From 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours. This tragic phenomenon reached new extremes when the Army reported a record-high number of suicides in July 2011 with the deaths of 33 active and reserve component service members reported as suicides. Additionally, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates 18 veterans die by suicide each day. Yet the true number of veterans who die by suicide, as Harrell and Berglass point out, is unknown. As more American troops return home from war, this issue will require increasingly urgent attention.

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) cordially invites you to the event, Losing the Battle, on November 1, 2011, from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., to discuss the issue of suicide in the U.S. military with leading experts in the field. At the event, CNAS will release the policy brief, Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide, by Dr. Margaret Harrell and Nancy Berglass, which identifies and addresses the challenges associated with service member and veteran suicide.

The event will feature a discussion on suicide in the military with a distinguished panel of experts, including the report's author Dr. Margaret Harrell, CNAS Senior Fellow and Director of the Joining Forces Initiative; General Peter Chiarelli, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army; Juliette Kayyem, national security columnist for The Boston Globe and a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University; and Dr. Jan Kemp, National Mental Health Program Director for the Department of Veterans Affairs.