FOX gets military suicide article wrong

Leave it to FOX to slam the troops and veterans. They used to shoot soldiers for being cowards, now they just push them so they do it themselves. This is what Comprehensive Soldier Fitness was based on.

"Do you think military suicides are new? Hardly. The tragic piece of news is they started to train them to be "resilient" only to have the suicides go up along with attempted suicides. They started the big push back in 2008. Why write a title to add to the fact too many of them think they were mentally weak and it is their fault? They were already resilient when they joined and were willing to go through what they had to do during training. They proved that even more when the majority of the suicides happened when they were out of combat and none of the members of their unit needed them. Billions a year has been wasted on making it worse for all of them."

That is the comment I left when I read this report from FOX

Is it time for the military to recruit for resiliency?
By Taylor Baldwin Kiland, Peter Fretwell
Published October 11, 2013

FoxNews.com
Today’s all-volunteer force is arguably one of the most highly trained and highly educated in our nation’s history. To maintain that edge, it must have a strong recruiting pipeline, one that seeks out physically fit, smart young men and women who are interested in serving their country and gaining valuable skills for subsequent careers outside the military.

Why, then, don’t they recruit for mental resiliency?

Some headlines about increased rates of military post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicides would lead you to believe that repeated deployments and exposure to combat trauma are the primary cause of a sharp rise in both. Last month’s mass murder at the Navy Yard, perpetrated by a Navy veteran, would seem to lend credence to that theory.

But a recent study just released by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) turns that assumption on its head.

The authors analyzed more than 150,000 military service members (member of the Millennium Cohort Study, the largest longitudinal U.S. military study that was launched in 2001).

More than half of the reported suicide victims had never witnessed combat or even deployed.

On the contrary, the single biggest risk factor associated with all the suicide deaths among this group was a mental disorder.
read more here

Ok, gee that sounds really serious. Doesn't it? After all look where the report came from. Too bad the Army released a different report.

The five-year study was undertaken in 2009, in response to the rising rate of military suicides. It's the largest study ever attempted on mental health risk and resilience among service members, and it involves an expansive partnership between the Army, the National Institute of Mental Health and several universities.

The coalition of researchers found a statistically significant rise in suicides following initial deployments. This finding contrasts sharply with a study featured in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Aug. 7 edition. Led by personnel at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, that study found no association between deployments and increased suicide risk.

That's just not the case for the Army, as depicted by Army STARRS data, said Dr. Michael Schoenbaum, collaborating scientist at NIMH.

"Soldiers who have deployed at least once do have an elevated suicide rate compared with Soldiers who never deployed," Schoenbaum said.

The AMA Journal article was based on analysis of data from the DOD Millennium Cohort Study that sampled all service members, Schoenbaum said, surmising at least half of the participants were Sailors and Airmen. In contrast, Army STARRS examines only Soldiers.

Could it just be they suck at what they are doing?