National Journal gets military suicide numbers wrong

Earlier today I posted a question about how reporters keep using the wrong numbers on military suicides and I just found another one.

325 Members of the Army Killed Themselves Last Year. Sorting Out Why Is No Easy Task.
Combat experience is not strongly associated with suicide. So how can we account for the Army's "epidemic"?
National Journal
By Brian Resnick
Updated: March 7, 2013

Resnick should have started with making sure that when a group is called "the highest" they are actually included in on the numbers used.

For one, it does not appear that combat experience or posttraumatic stress disorder is related to suicide. A recent report on suicides in the National Guard (which has the highest rate for all Army branches) could find no conclusive correlation between active service and suicide.

That claim is not true even by DOD standards. Take a look at what they released.

But that was followed up by this, also a stunning statement that seems to have gone right over his head.

“Soldiers who reported suicide intentions during deployment generally reported the same intentions after deployment, and the association of combat experiences with suicide symptoms was negligible,” the researchers concluded.

In other words, they reported they thought about killing themselves while deployed and when they came back, they still wanted to? But that didn't seem to make him question why?

Then he quoted this.

PTSD is a real and damaging consequence of deployment, and on the surface it might seem related to suicide. But more than half of service members who have died by suicide have never been deployed. “So clearly it’s not a combat issue,” says Craig Bryan, a psychologist at the University of Utah who focuses his research on Army suicides.

I suppose he didn't notice that veterans are 7% of the population but are 22% of the suicides but he followed what military brass loves to claim. They never seem to factor in that training itself is in fact traumatic enough to some that they can in fact end up with PTSD. They also fail to acknowledge that the numbers of servicemen and women is showing they are not seeking help as much as they should. 43% of those who committed suicide did not seek help but 57% Military suicides happened after they sought help.

The report found very little relationship between whether a soldier had faced active combat and whether they committed suicide, but the study suggests that problems at home that may be associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder could have an impact on whether a soldier takes his or her own life.

The charts offered to explain how serious all of this is came from a study done between 1990 and 2010 but the article he wrote was for 2012, the deadliest year for suicides connected to military service. The other chart he used was from 2008, totally disregarding the latest study showing the true numbers.

The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting the increase in veterans’ suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If he wanted to be accurate he should have used this too

Testimony presented to the Massachusetts Commission on the Concerns of Vietnam veterans in Greenfield, Massachusetts on May 4, 1982, declared that "Vietnam veterans have nationally averaged 28 suicides a day since 1975, amounting to over 70,000."

But I guess he wants the new generation of veterans to believe it is only happening to them and forget the fact that research into treating PTSD has been ongoing for over 40 years. If they noticed this fact, they would be even more angry over how little has actually been done to take care of this wound.

You can read the rest yourself but I doubt we will ever know what is wrong with these reporters. How can they take something that is so terrible and not get it right? Don't they feel at least some obligation to the families left behind? Did they forget that all of these numbers have been getting worse every year and no one has been held accountable because they don't have a clue what questions to ask the answer for?