Overall, the services reported 434 suicides by personnel on active duty, significantly more than the 381 suicides by active-duty personnel reported in 2009. The 2010 total is below the 462 deaths in combat, excluding accidents and illness. In 2009, active-duty suicides exceeded deaths in battle.
This paragraph is from the linked article.
Doesn't it contradict the sentence heebe quotes?
Read further down:
...just taking into account the deaths of reservists who were not included in last week's figures pushes the number of suicides last year to at least 468.
That total includes some Air Force and Marine Corps reservists who took their own lives while not on active duty, and it exceeds the 462 military personnel killed in battle.
And the preview button keeps me from being pwned by LB yet again.
3: Thanks, LB!
Reading the whole article! I should try that some time!
I really wish they'd give the figures in some way that would allow an easier comparison with civilian figures from a comparable demographic group. 434 suicides out of 1.5 million active duty military is very high, even figuring that these are mostly men. 468 suicides out of 3.0 million active duty and reserve military is pretty much right on the male 15-24 rate (which is as close as I could find quickly). Which suggests an abnormally low rate for reservists, which goes against much of the article. Which goes back to my main point about the figures.
6: Couldn't agree more. Although, I do have the vague belief that if there wasn't anything going on, you'd expect the baseline rate of suicide for any occupational group to be below the population rate, because a fair chunk of suicides are going to be in mental difficulties precluding holding down a job for a while before they kill themselves. So even matching the population rate is high.
6: That's probably an artifact of the low reporting rate for non-mobilized reservists, though.
8: I think you are right that matching the population rate is higher than what you'd expect given that they made it into the army. But, I don't know how much of an effect it would be.
9: Good point.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?
You know, even though they didn't spell my name right, it's nice to see a little gratitude for all I do.
You can get more congruent data, by the way, by querying WISQARS. The active-duty suicide rate per 100,000 of 28.9 (434 out of 1.5 million) compares to a 15-24 male rate of 16.38 (averaged 1999-2007), but an 18-24 male rate of 19.66.
Continuing my data delve: this report says there were actually 1.4 million active-duty military in fiscal year 2009, pushing the suicide rate up to 31 per 100,000. I'm looking to see if I can make an general-population suicide rate adjusted to military demographics.
13: Also, keep in mind that the armed forces screen out (in theory, at least; waivers have become a lot more common in wartime) people with obvious mental or physical disorders or substance abuse problems. The civilian population would therefore include a higher proportion of people with risk factors for suicide
15: LB already said that, mostly. The armed forces also usually screen out those at the least risk for mental disorders, relatively speaking, but that is a much smaller effect these days.
For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Any random neocon knows the solution to this problem.
There's a limit to what I can do without cross-tabulations, but the age-and-gender-weighted average suicide rate is 18.38. This assumes gender distribution is equal across age groups, which I thought was unlikely, but surprisingly the report says the percentage of women is nearly equal among enlisted and officers (14.1% and 15.5% respectively - equally low, of course).
Past this point, issues like mental health screening screening and the makeup of the combat-zone subset of active-duty are probably more important than getting a good comparator.
Though regarding screening (screening screening), I suspect the trauma of war is significant enough that suicide would barely be lower even if all prior suicidal inclinations could be perfectly selected out.
I'd think you'd want to compare with comparable (demographically) civilians in the same years and the peace time a military.
Not to venture any conjecture about what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in other conflicts in other times and places the phenomenon of underreporting of suicide has been observed, not least because suicide can be difficult to distinguish from accidental death in a combat zone. Sometimes deliberately so. Same is true of homicide.
I think that you guys are looking for the shit when the pony is in the middle of a two theater war (sorry- no combat in Iraq anymore) the death in combat is less than that of suicide, which is only marginally higher than the general population. Compare to drunk driving deaths of the same cohort, which I'll bet is deadlier.
15: Ha ha ha ha ha! There's a lot of bitterness from my online friends in the moms-of-kids-with-special-needs community about how heavily the military is recruiting in special ed classes and telling kids how to game the tests to hide their mental illnesses. I'm not sure to what extent scams like this succeed, but I'm skeptical the military is as committed to that kind of purity as is claimed.
Our former foster son Rowan is currently planning on college over the military, which delights me even though I think it's almost impossible he'll be academically ready. Whether or not he'll have something to ask/tell in a few years when he graduates, a war zone is no place for a kid with complex PTSD already. I hate that most of his male mentors seem to disagree and tell him the military is what makes a man. I'm counterbalancing by telling him that being in foster care is enough time with someone controlling every detail of your life, and I think he's sympathetic to that.
A lot of good stats in this report. Of most interest for this post is Table 5 on pg.8 (Active Duty Military Deaths 1980-2008, Cause of Death). It would be a bit better if they had rates, but the total military personnel by year is on the page above. Interesting that there were more military deaths per year in the early 80s than any year this past decade (although rates were a bit lower >2M then 1.3-1.5M recently)--the big change is drop in accidental deaths. Eyeballing it, suicide rates seem a bit up recently, but not a whole lot,
This started out as a comment on the methodological issues touched on above, as I've talked quite a bit about this particular issue with a friend who studies suicide (inter alia) and who did part of his psychiatric residency at a VA hospital treating vets with PTSD. But I've given up on formulating the methodological point in such a way as to allow me to include the two following bits of info, which are what I really wanted to communicate, as they give some idea of how brutalizing occupation can be, combat aside.
(1) Almost 20% (the exact figure was something like 18.5%) of the vets treated by my friend claim to have witnessed the rape of a civilian by members of their unit. (One might worry about confabulation here, but my informant says that that's unlikely in the case of a PTSD patient discussing their trauma. He does think some of them were underplaying the degree of their involvement.) Now, the incidence of that sort of thing is going to be far higher among soldiers who've sought treatment for PTSD than it is among veterans in general, but in the aggregate that's still an appalling number of assaults. (None of the patients reported what they'd witnessed to any sort of authority, by the way.)
(2) An underappreciated number of returning vets have joint problems caused by, e.g., months of marching on sand while carrying 100 lbs of gear. The resulting mobility issues make it hard for many of them to find work (these are, in typical cases, people with only high-school diplomas or GEDs, for whom finding a purely desk job is difficult). It isn't something that (to my friend's knowledge) is tracked, but it was a common enough issue among VA patients that other practitioners were struck by it as well. His description was something like, "I keep seeing kids who tell me, I'm 23, I'm going to be on disability forever, my life is over".
More Falklands veterans committed suicide in the decade after the conflict than died in the conflict itself. I am drawn to two conclusions:
1) there is simply a higher rate of suicide than one tends to believe;
2) we have got radically worse at treating psychological trauma since, say, 1945. No way were there 300,000 ex-serviceman suicides in the decade after the Second World War. Maybe the whole talking cure/picking at the scab approach isn't as good as we think.
"No way were there 300,000 ex-serviceman suicides in the decade after the Second World War."
Why not?
It seems rather implausible on the face of it, don't you think? 30,000 suicides a year, out of an age cohort which would normally have seen a few hundred a year? I suspect people would have noticed.
2) we have got radically worse at treating psychological trauma since, say, 1945
Alternatively, as a society, we have got radically better at creating psychological trauma in returning servicemen since 1945.
32. Seems more plausible. Accounts generally concentrate on the idea that people of that generation weren't taught to have such high expectations, but equally they weren't taught to have as high opinions of themselves as we were. I suspect people were traumatised, but nobody thought that much about it. They suffered, their friends and relatives suffered, and it was very nasty and much as it always had been. If you tell somebody they're traumatised, you can pretty much guarantee they will be; if you don't, then 'life's a bitch and then you die' would seem more of a feature than a bug.
Knecht, the trauma of war must exacerbate a lot of underlying predispositions that are not yet exposed. I have a client who has schizophrenia and is very paranoid who served in the army.
There are others who have very bad mood disorders--even with psychotic features. They lasted in the army for a while.
I looked at JAG around 2002 (not terribly seriously), and they seemed to be quick to screen out anyone who took any kind of medication at all.
Appealling in the sense of plausible, that is, not pleasant.
It wouldn't be at all surprising if cultural changes meant that individuals were both worse at handling certain kinds of trauma, and much less inured to the stress that results, and our society as a whole was a lot less well-suited to dealing with the people involved. I mean, you can't help noticing how we seem to be a bit shitty, collectively, these days.
39. Yes, we are. Part of it may be traceable to my generation's reaction to the brutalisation of our parents' lives, and you can argue that this created unreal expectations about people (rather than institutions - I stand by my views on institutions.) This is not, obvs, a rationale for returning to the status quo ante circa Cathy Come Home, but rather an acceptance that the tabula rasa sociology of the 60s was ultimately as rubbish as the tabula rasa sociology of 18th century Rousseauists.
But this might have been OK except that it was immediately by Reagan/Thatcher's assault on the idea of society. So we got a double whammy where kids were brought up to believe they were special snowflakes, but it was their fault if they melted. Which is where we seem to be at present. So fucked.
So we got a double whammy where kids were brought up to believe they were special snowflakes, but it was their fault if they melted.
I was raised to blame Peru for my errors.
re: 40
Yeah, although I'm moderately optimistic about the current 'youth' who seem to be reacting rather well to the totally shit hand life has dealt them.
Part of it may be traceable to my generation's reaction to the brutalisation of our parents' lives
I'm a child of boomers [both parents born in the 50s], so in my case I need to go back to my grandparents generation on this one. But yeah.
So we got a double whammy where kids were brought up to believe they were special snowflakes, but it was their fault if they melted.
Often true, yeah, except there is a percentage who believe that it's clearly the fault of others that their special-snowflake-dom hasn't been properly rewarded. This stuff ends up bringing out the worst of my class prejudice, though!
Anyway, I think 32 is probably a bigger part of the picture than 33. Or at least, we've become better at keeping people who have experienced psychological trauma alive.
43.2: doesn't that directly contradict the observation that suicide rates are high?
In past wars, many more of those with psychological trauma would be dead from the physical trauma associated with it.
45: oh, right, I see.
I'm not sure that's the case, actually. Not everyone and not only people with severe injuries gets PTSD, and you're talking about fairly severe (and thus comparatively rare) injuries here if they would have been lethal in '45 but aren't now. More facts needed...
It doesn't seem at all obvious to me that physical trauma would be correlated with suicide in that sort of way. I suppose it'd be easy enough to compare, say, car accident victims with injured ex-service people.
More facts needed...
In fact penicillin was not generally available until right at the end of WWII, so there may be a point here. Whether it's a big enough point to cover off 300,000 people I take leave to doubt, but there may be other factors.
Wikipedia suggests it saved 12-15% of lives, which sounds like a wet finger to me, and certainly isn't a whole lot. What did the rest die of, and would they survive now?
ABC News, 2006: "But the wounded in Iraq also have a much greater chance of surviving. In World War II, 30 percent of all injured troops died; 24 percent died in Vietnam. In Iraq, just 9 percent of the injured lose their lives. Improved body armor and advances in battlefield medicine have saved countless lives."
47, 48: I wasn't saying the physical trauma was correlated with suicide, per se (though physical disability is correlated with suicide for older males). But, it is hard to imagine many situations where you could be psychologically traumatized but don't experience at greatly increased risk of physical trauma. And I wasn't just thinking of a single incident where wound physical trauma psychological trauma.
For example, in WWII, a soldier who experienced a psychological trauma, even without any physical injury, would be far more likely to be killed before the end of his duty than someone in any of the current wars where the U.S. is involved. Leaving aside improvements in medicine, armor, and mobility, WWII just plain more dangerous. In addition, there was (for the U.S.) no idea of a 'tour' and then being sent back home. Most of those guys were kept in combat until dead, serious wounding, or Hiroshima goes boom.
Plus, as pwned on preview, I think 47 greatly underestimates how much medicine (and the tactics for getting somebody to treatment) had improved.
Those funny boxes were supposed to be arrows.
It doesn't seem at all obvious to me that physical trauma would be correlated with suicide in that sort of way. I suppose it'd be easy enough to compare, say, car accident victims with injured ex-service people.
I think a better comparison would be with victims intentionally injured by (people using) motor vehicles.
Would people injured while riding in a Pinto be close enough?
re: 53
Not if you are trying to work out whether it's the physical trauma that's the root cause.
55: I would think that intentional and unintentional physical trauma have slightly different repercussions.
51:In addition, there was (for the U.S.) no idea of a 'tour' and then being sent back home. (in WWII)
Not according to my understanding. By my understanding, most soldiers in WWII saw two major combat missions or battles, say 30 days each separated by 90+ days, and spent the rest of their time training, support, mop-up, or garrison duty. Very very few were at Guad, Iwo, and Okinawa. My dad did New Guinea and Marshalls, roughly 2-3 weeks under fire.
I think the study that said soldiers should get no more than 90 days combat in a lifetime came out before WWII's end.
Today's professional soldiers do as a matter of fact endure more sustained extended stress, if considerably less intense, than in previous wars.
Leaving aside improvements in medicine, armor, and mobility, WWII just plain more dangerous. In addition, there was (for the U.S.) no idea of a 'tour' and then being sent back home. Most of those guys were kept in combat until dead, serious wounding, or Hiroshima goes boom.
True, but don't forget that (for example) the average American soldier or marine in the Pacific only saw about 40 days of actual combat in the whole of the war. They weren't fighting all the time. Most of the time they were sitting around on ships or on island bases in the rear area.
It's entirely possible that fighting in Iraq may induce more trauma than fighting in WW2 simply because you spend more time in combat. Combat effectiveness starts to degrade significantly after 90 days in combat; that's one reason the British Army limits its tours to six months.
re: 56
Well yes, that would be the point of the comparison, no? To measure what that might be. Rather than including it in both sets.
58: Wow you got pwned by an on point post by Bob. That can't happen often.
57: But there was certainly no way to get back home for six months (for an enlisted man) and nobody's term of enlistment ran out (I know stop-loss orders have a similar effect now, but it isn't universal and it doesn't run for five years). It was a different pattern.
I wonder also to what extent the fact that it's nominally a professional/volunteer army has an impact? After all it's harder to think of this all as being something that's being done to you, and which you can resist or otherwise psychologically defend against [as with conscripts] when you've actively chosen to join up.*
* even if, for a lot of people, their economic situation might mean they don't really believe they had much choice.
60: I know, it stung.
61: not going home in the middle may have helped with the trauma. Being yanked out of combat and ending up back home 24-48 hours later being asked to deal with the leaky bathroom tap is a deeply disorienting experience. So's the return trip two weeks later.
This is OT but I figure this is an active thread and might be of interest to some of you. There is a womens/transgender clinic in the Bay Area that is trying to raise money to stay open. I am linking to Tom Limoncelli's post about it since he has better information.
62: a lot of the US army in both WW2 and Vietnam was made up of volunteers. In Vietnam, it was a majority-volunteer army.
I should think that a lot of the British army in 1940 was the same. (Less so in 1945.) Conscription only came back into force in Britain in September 1939; at that point the British Army, active and reserve, was roughly 900,000 strong, all volunteers. By the outbreak of the Battle of France it was 1.65 million: still a majority-volunteer army, though the private soldiers would of course have been disproportionately conscripts.
63.2: True. But also, if you take a group of people who fought in the Mariana and Palau Islands campaign and have them invade Okinawa, many of those who experienced trauma from the first action aren't going to be post-duty trauma casualties because they didn't survive the second.
Alternatively, as a society, we have got radically better at creating psychological trauma in returning servicemen since 1945.
It surely must also be relevant that WWII was the "good" war and accepted as both necessary and just.
re: 67
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if that was a part of it. That said, people in my family were involved in all kinds of nasty colonial shit and didn't seem to suffer any issues as a result. Hardly conclusive evidence, mind!
62: a lot of the US army in both WW2 and Vietnam was made up of volunteers. In Vietnam, it was a majority-volunteer army.
Looking at the numbers on this isn't going to give you an accurate psychological picture of how 'volunteer' it was, though. A volunteer in WWII was someone who knew that not volunteering meant he was getting drafted, for the most part. Didn't mean he wasn't enthusiastically patriotic about it, but volunteering wasn't a free choice between serving in the military or not serving in the military.
Same, to a lesser extent, for Vietnam -- not volunteering certainly upped your odds of staying out of the service, but it wouldn't have been a sure thing at all, and someone who would rather not have served might easily sign up in return for better odds on getting to pick his assignment.
someone who would rather not have served might easily sign up in return for better odds on getting to pick his assignment
An accurate description of the majority of vietnam veterans I know.
In Vietnam, it was a majority-volunteer army.
This must include people who were already in the army before the war started, right? (For certain values of "started.")
Wiki suggests that "During the active combat phase [in Vietnam], the possibility of avoiding combat by selecting their service and military specialty led as many as four million out of 11 million eligible men to enlist [voluntarily]".
Here is an article discussing PTSD in general:
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/articles/20110128.aspx
Not PTSD specifically, but wasn't it after WWII where there were studies showing that a large percentage of soldiers either did not fire their guns or really aim them effectively which led to changes in training/indoctrination that aimed to change that. (I believe this was linked here before.) I'd could imagine the long-term effects of that could include increase things like depression and suicidal ideation.
I'd could imagine the long-term effects of that could include increase things like depression and suicidal ideation
I'm not sure I understand. An increase because you'd feel responsible for more deaths?
Here's the text of an article from 2006 in the Financial-Times on it (mentions a book as well). Describes the move toward "operant conditioning" in military training after WW II.
n 1947, US General S.L.A. "Slam" Marshall surprised the military world with his book, Men Against Fire. Marshall was a combat historian who had travelled with the US Army and interviewed soldiers after battle. In the book he made the startling suggestion that in the second world war "on an average not more than 15 per cent of the men had actually fired at the enemy... the best showing that could be made by the most spirited and aggressive companies was that one in four had made at least some use of his fire-power."
75: *My* theory (based on a casual self interview study, n=1 and watching the Bourne movies) is that eventually some soldiers who were in the group that would not have otherwise fired directly at the enemy would have trouble coming to grips with what they had done under that training. Or alternatively, fucking with people's heads in major ways has consequences.
otherwise *not* fired directly at the enemy
||
Lambert at Corrente seems to have some good liveblogging of Egypt. Military moved in, drove security forces away, stepped out of the tanks and embraced protestors. Goddddamn!@ Clinton seems to be diplospeaking Mubarek to exile.
Let despots tremple everywhere!
On Topic? How does a gov't get a military that will mow the civilians down with M-50s instead of scaring off the Gestapo and policia? Hmmm? How-how? How do you create soldiers and NCO's and ossifers that fire on women and children?
See 28 and the rest of the thread.
|>
SLA Marshall's "Men Against Fire" is not universally accepted as being based on fact. But it's a good read, and it definitely had an effect.
It also inspired this excellent and disturbingly prescient Suck.com essay, which makes it worthwhile in any event.
but wasn't it after WWII where there were studies showing that a large percentage of soldiers either did not fire their guns or really aim them effectively which led to changes in training/indoctrination that aimed to change that.
Not just training and indoctrination, but weaponry. Your average U.S. infantryman in WWII was walking around with a single shot, semi-automatic M1 rifle or carbine. When you're facing an enemy heavily armed with machine guns, you're going to be reluctant to stick your head up from behind the rock to carefully aim and fire that single shot.
Those same studies showed that the closer a soldier stood to the BAR man in his company, the higher number of shots he took. This finding formed part of the rationale for phasing out the M1 and M14 in favor of the M16, which was capable of fully automatic fire.
80: I almost quoted instead the 2nd paragraph of the article.
Although Marshall's methods were later criticised, there does appear to be some truth in his assertion. During the Sicily campaign in 1943, Lieutenant-Colonel Lionel Wigram of the British School of Infantry had found that only a quarter of the men in a typical British platoon could be relied on to try to engage the enemy in battle.
Upon re-reading, 81 was phrased carelessly. The M1 was not, properly speaking, single shot, as it employed a clip that held multiple rounds. It was, however, semi-automatic: only one shot per pull of the trigger.
Beyond Good vs. Bad war, weren't there other contextual things that make it hard to compare WWII with later wars? Scale, for instance? Seems like every man of a certain age during WWII had to have some involvement in it, and that would create a different post-war culture among the total male cohort than now, when only a tiny percentage is fighting in the war. And more of the other people in the society--the parents, the wives, the younger siblings--would have some personal experience and relationship with combat veterans, so any given veteran was more likely to encounter a more 'understanding' context. No?
Is there any actual evidence that WWII veterans readjusted to civilian life better than veterans of more recent wars? I have read a number of novels about WWII veterans who were never the same again ("Slam the Big Door", by John D. MacDonald comes to mind).
well for one thing, they had big enough stones to call themselves "the greatest gneneration"
86: The term was actually coined by Tom Brokaw (born 1940). A good perspective on some of the issues of returning vets can be gotten from Bill Mauldin's book Back Home--not as memorable as his war cartoons/memoir, but shows how things were not necessarily that great.
Combat effectiveness starts to degrade significantly after 90 days in combat; that's one reason the British Army limits its tours to six months.
that's one for the category "contexts where you were really hoping to see the word 'three' instead of the word 'six'".
84 makes an important point. Not only was the return environment in the US more understanding, on this view, but the entire nation was in war mode, rationing and making do. In our current environment, the US is chirping merrily along, watching Dancing with the Stars, buying princess paraphernalia for its daughters, and pretending that homeless people don't exist: not a reality-based scenario for returning soldiers. The cognitive dissonance has to be extreme. Fitting in here again has to be quite difficult.
88: well, that's 90 days in combat, not 90 days in a combat zone. For some of that six-month tour you're going to be going out on foot patrols where you don't hear a single shot, or sitting in sangars watching nothing much happen, or whatever.