At Army base, an aggressive campaign against suicide

This is a good story on paying attention to soldiers in trouble but it is not a good story on "resilience training" when they are still attempting suicide at high rates.

At Army base, an aggressive campaign against suicide
More service members killed themselves last year than were killed in Afghanistan. At Ft. Bliss in Texas, commanders have built a system of early intervention.
By David S. Cloud
Los Angeles Times
April 14, 2013

FT. BLISS, Texas — Army Pvt. John Jeffery stumbled into Kyle Boswell's barracks room at Ft. Bliss before dawn one day in February, his eyes glassy.

"I've done something," Jeffery mumbled to his buddy. "I can't tell anyone. It's going to happen."

He had just learned his girlfriend was cheating on him. The Army had decided to kick him out for using heroin. Now the 21-year-old veteran of Afghanistan had downed more than two bottles of Vicodin and Oxycodone, powerful prescription painkillers. Boswell rushed him to the emergency room, and he remains in the hospital psychiatric ward.

The case is a success of sorts — a soldier treated, a suicide prevented — and it reflects an encouraging shift at Ft. Bliss, one of the Army's largest bases, a vast Texas sprawl of 30,000 soldiers and row upon row of armored vehicles brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

With a suicide epidemic sweeping the military, commanders at Ft. Bliss have aggressively approached mental health problems, building an early warning system to identify and monitor distressed soldiers, and intervene at the first sign someone is considering suicide.

The goal is to change how the Army handles a mental breakdown, turning it from a silent ordeal borne alone by a soldier, maybe with help from a chaplain or psychiatrist, to a collective mission, in which the base community has responsibility for stopping a potential suicide.
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