Rise in Military Suicides Predicted in 2009 On Wounded Times

The following is from San Antonio Express Hood Army Suicides Hit Record Mark on January 2011.

The Pentagon has launched mental health and suicide-prevention programs and created an Army task force in hopes of turning the tide. In 2008, the Army began a five-year study with the National Institute of Mental Health. That research effort examines risk and resilience factors associated with suicides. A new military research consortium will test and develop interventions

Chiarelli told reporters that he believes the programs instituted by the Army in recent years have saved lives, but Col. Carl Castro, director of the medicine research program that established the suicide consortium, said no one is sure of their effectiveness.
“We think they’re effective,” he told the Express-News, “but we haven’t done the research to demonstrate that they may in fact be effective.” 

Chiarelli pointed to the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, which offers screening tests for soldiers, family members and Army civilian workers, as one successful effort. He said research comparing soldiers who committed suicide against a control group showed that, “broadly speaking, resilient soldiers do not complete suicide.” 

Yet the increase in suicides was predicted in 2009 once this "attempt" began.  It did not come from the Pentagon.  It did not come from highly educated military brass.  It did not come from members of Congress. The prediction of more dying from their own hands came from me. 

"If you promote this program the way Battlemind was promoted, count on the numbers of suicides and attempted suicides to go up instead of down. It's just one more deadly mistake after another and just as dangerous as sending them into Iraq without the armor needed to protect them."

I have written about Comprehensive Soldier Fitness making it worse for them to the point where I have lost all hope anyone with the power to stop this would actually take action instead of supporting this.

So the suicides in the military went up and they didn't notice this was part of the reason.  Suicides within the Veterans Community went up and they did not even care anymore because the DOD did not have to account for any who received this training.

Congress came up with bills without ever once considering this as the biggest part of the problem and they kept paying for it financially while the soldiers paid for it with their lives.

So while I continue to comfort the men and women believing PTSD is their fault instead of the DOD telling them they are mentally weak instead of emotionally strong so they feel it all more, I also have to comfort families when it is too late to remove the stigma the military has actually paid billions to inflict on them.

And now the latest report comes from USA Today Experts worry high military suicide rates are new normal

Seven years after the rate of suicides by soldiers more than doubled, the Army has failed to reduce the tragic pace of self-destruction, and experts worry the problem is a "new normal."

"It's very clear that nothing that the Army has done has resulted in the suicide rates coming down," said Carl Castro, a psychologist who retired from the Army in 2013, when he was a colonel overseeing behavioral health research programs.

The sharp rise in the Army's suicide rate from 2004 through 2009 coincided with unusually heavy demands on the nation's all-volunteer military, as hundreds of thousands of troops, most of them in the Army, deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The vast majority have since come home, but suicide rates remain stubbornly high.

The Army's suicide rate for active-duty soldiers averaged nearly 11-per-100-000 from Sept. 11, 2001, until shortly after the Iraq invasion in 2004. It more than doubled over the next five years, and, with the exception of a spike in 2012, has remained largely constant at 24-to-25-per-100,000, roughly 20% to 25 higher than a civilian population of the same age and gender makeup as the military.

This is the best example of how this has failed.

"Scientists still don't know exactly why suicides increased so dramatically in the military. Major studies have shown no direct link between the deaths and being deployed overseas, and suicide increased even among soldiers who did not deploy."

The Warrior Saw, Suicides After War by Kathie Costos

If it did not work for the non-deployed, then how the hell did they expect it to work on those with multiple deployments?