Suicides

Soldiers with higher levels of stress at home combined with the stress of deployments and feelings of guilt often turn to suicide as a way to escape reality. If your circumstances at home are already stressful, deployments will make them worse. Sometimes, the only solution to a stressed out Soldier in a war zone is suicide.

Strained by war and long overseas tours, U.S. Soldiers killed themselves last year at the highest rate on record, the toll rising for a fourth straight year and even surpassing the suicide rate among comparable civilians. Army leaders said they were doing everything they could think of to curb the deaths and appealed for more mental health professionals to join and help out. Clearly, the military is going above and beyond to try and prevent further lives from being taken.

According to the sociologist Emile Durkheim, when a person has a very strong degree of social connectedness, he or she may identify with its values or causes to such an extent that the sense of his or her own personal identity is diminished. For example, the values of the military predominated over the individual’s values. Such is the case in altruistic suicide, which has been defined as the “the self destruction demanded by a society... as a price for being a member of that society.” (DeSpelder & Strickland).

The highest officer in each service told lawmakers they are working hard to fix the problems — devoting more senior leadership attention, instituting more and better training, attacking the stigma of asking for help, hiring more mental health providers and working across agency lines to keep an eye on and fund care for at-risk troops who transition back to civilian life. The specific steps range from implementing or strengthening “battle buddy” programs to ensure troops look out for each other; embedding, as the Marines have done, more mental health professionals within units; improving the “handoff” from the war zone to providers back home; and ensuring...