Veterans and Active Duty Military Suicide Rates 2012

Recently a study published in the American Journal of Public Health finds that suicides have replaced car accidents as the leading cause of injury-related death in the U.S. This is in part because deaths from automobile accidents are down; well that part is good but does not tell the whole story: between 2000 and 2009 deaths by suicide went up by 15%.  

Professor Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University says, “Suicides are terribly undercounted; I think the problem is much worse than official data would lead us to believe.” He added “there may be 20 percent or more unrecognized suicides…Many of the poisoning deaths may actually be intended, he added. A lot of these deaths are due from overdoses of prescription drugs. ”  Furthermore Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology said, "Both global and national increases in the number and rate of suicides through 2009, and as even more recent data indicates, through 2010, should concern all of us."

Now I am not going into the why very deep, it may be the hard economy, the way society has changed in the past 40 years or so, or people give too much credence to their sadness and surrender to their own feeling of hopelessness.   For the most part I say that it is their own decision, and let them have at it. I know "a permanent solution to a temporary problem", but temporary pain can drive some to extreme solutions, between the devil and the deep blue sea so to speak.  What I do want to explore is the correlation between the general population’s suicide rates, and those of Veterans and active duty military committing suicide.

"Military suicides have increased since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan", according to a Center for a New American Security Suicide report.  "In the fiscal year 2009 alone, 1,868 veterans of these wars have made suicide attempts", according to armytimes.com.  And you read things like this, “The epidemic is raging among those who are currently serving too. From 2005 to 2010, approximately one service member committed suicide every 36 hours, the CNAS study revealed.”   This raise in the rate of suicide is generally attributed to PTSD, and some of it may rightly be, but how much is caused by the same problems that everyone else is burdened with? 

“It (was) found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets. (Veterans committed suicide at the rate of between 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.)”  CBS News.

This is a problem of sets, subsets, and overlapping subsets.  The set is the general population, the two subsets are 1- suicides without a military connection connection, and 2- suicides with a military connection.  It should be obvious that there is an overlay between subset 1 and 2.

To explore this let us assume the rates proffered by CBS to be true, but then let us also assume that 8.9 percent commented suicide for the same reason as the general population, this is the overlapping of the two subsets.  That leave the remaining Veterans who decide to end it at a 9.8 rate.  Now compare the non-overlapping portions of the two subsets:  8.9 for the general population, and 9.8 for the military non-overlapped subset. This is only 1.1 percent higher than the general population, hardly twice the rate proclaimed.  Good?  No, but the picture is not near as bleak as the media would have you believe.  The higher unemployment rate for Vets may help explain the different for this 1.1 percent, maybe they feel more guilt than the others did, the truth is only the one who does the act knows, and maybe not even them.  

One could decide to study the affect of serving on the rate of alcoholism as a result of having served.  If the study found that 6 percent of those who had served suffered with alcoholism would it be fair to say that this rate of alcoholism was due solely to serving when the general population has a alcoholism rate of 5 percent?  No, it would be the differences between those who served and the general population that could be attributed to having served.  If the study found that only 4 percent of the military were alcoholic then the 1 percent differences could be ascribed to having served, you would not blame the military for the 4 percent.

Now the people at CBS and other media outlets are at least as smart as I, and they know how they are projecting their stories to further their agenda.  They are concerned, imo, with painting the Military in a bad light, hard and uncaring of the troops, there agenda, as far as I can make out, it to persuade Americans that the Peace Corps is a much better choice than the US Military.  Now if they are not pushing this agenda and truly believe that the military is causing the troops, present and past duty, to commit suicide at twice the rate of the non-military population they need to go take a course is Set Theory!