Heartbreaking….
120 US war veteran suicides a week | Herald Sun
THE US military is experiencing a “suicide epidemic” with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an investigation by US television network CBS.
At least 6256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005 – an average of 17 a day – the network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.
While the suicide rate among the general population was 8.9 per 100,000, the level among veterans was between 18.7 and 20.8 per 100,000.
That figure rose to 22.9 to 31.9 suicides per 100,000 among veterans aged 20 to 24 – almost four times the non-veteran average for the age group.
“Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems,” CBS quoted veterans’ rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.
CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem to be known.
“Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,” Mike Bowman said.
“They don’t want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.”
2 Responses
I see part of the problem as being the warrior belief that real soldiers tough it out linked with the belief that any type of mental health problem is just weakness on the part of the person who is suffering. The military is not going to see these deaths as casualties of war but as a personal failure on the part of the solider who has died by his or her own hand. Cultural beliefs die hard.
I do wonder if, when demobilized soldiers return home from a war front, that the adjustment they have to make from a life of constant state of alertness, interspersed with periods of mental exhaustion when not on duty, to a form of life where they are not “acting on” situations of life and death importance, but milling around, unimportant, in a largely oblivious soup of existence and daily tedium makes for a surreality for them. How does an individual square such profound in value shifts in their lives? Is self-annihilation preferable to an inability to come to grips with some bothersome ideas about one’s worth? G