Army Suicides Still on the Rise

clipped from www.propublica.org Yesterday, the Pentagon announced that the rate of soldiers committing suicides increased last year to the highest level in thirty years. As today’s New York Times reports, the number of suicides among soldiers has now increased for the fourth year in a row [1]. Somewhere between 128 and 143 soldiers killed themselves in 2008. (Fifteen cases are still under investigation.) Army officials in turn pointed yesterday to new programs [2] and a campaign to combat the stigma of mental wounds.   "We need to move quickly to do everything we can to reverse the very disturbing number of suicides we have in the Army," Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, who is responsible for suicide prevention, told the Times. The deaths were about evenly divided among soldiers on deployment, those returned from deployments, and their comrades who had never deployed, according to the report.

The piece continues:

Since 2003, yearly reports on the Army’s suicide rates have spurred similar news stories, and similar reactions by Pentagon officials. Suicide-prevention initiatives – such as the "battle-buddy" program, which relied on ordinary soldiers to keep an eye on each other – have spawned in the wake of the grim statistics, but the numbers have only worsened.

In 2005, the Army’s surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, told a House Appropriations subcommittee, "That’s still part of our culture: Real men don’t see [mental health counselors]… I would like to see a culture that resets the force mentally."