Suicide Prevention Failed, Military Moves Onto Predicting?

Suicide prevention efforts failed big time. No matter how much money the DOD spent on prevention efforts, all 900 and some odd, the fact is there were more suicides. Did they get a clue about this? Hell no! They pushed the failed programs harder. Now they want to pretend they got that part right, at the same time they admit they got it wrong or at least it will be in the future?

If they understood suicides went up after they pushed failures like Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, then why did they push it year after year? If they had a clue as to why younger veterans commit suicide triple their peer rate after all the "prevention" training, then why didn't they end it?

Prediction can only work if they understand what the problem is, but so far, they haven't even begun to understand the problem originated with them!

Maybe they should just call Penn and Teller and save a lot of taxpayer funds and actually do something that will work to save lives!

How the Army Is Trying To Predict—and Prevent—the Next Suicide
NEXTGOV
BY FRANK KONKEL
MAY 7, 2015

There's more than just $65 million riding on a five-year effort to locate at-risk soldiers and get them the help they need before it's too late.

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and it’s been a particularly problematic issue for the U.S. military since soldiers first mobilized overseas in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the U.S. Army, historically high suicide rates have more than doubled since 2001 among active duty soldiers, with 259 taking their own lives last year, according to a Pentagon report released in January.

“This is a big problem for the United States Army, it’s a big problem for the United States and it’s a big problem for the world,” Roy Wallace, assistant deputy chief of staff with the Army G-1, said Tuesday at the Government Analytics Forum in Washington, D.C.

Wallace said he believes analytics technology will succeed where various suicide prevention efforts over the years have failed: in saving soldiers’ lives.

The Army is in the midst of a five-year, $65 million effort called Army STARRS, which stands for Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Service members. The program aims to identify factors that protect or put at risk a soldier’s mental health.

With partners that include the National Institute of Mental Health, the University of Michigan and other educational institutions, Wallace said the Army is in a “huge big data operation,” analyzing some 1.1 billion data records from 39 Army and Defense Department databases looking for insights that could suggest a soldier is at elevated risk for suicide.

“What we’re trying to do is get down to predict who might commit suicide,” Wallace said.
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Considering they ignored the database telling them suicides went up after they started trying to prevent them, they have a lot bigger problem dealing with awareness and reality.