The Military’s Suicide Epidemic is America’s Suicide Epidemic
By: Jay Michaelson
Tags: Suicide, America, Society, Mental Health, Military

Leadership across the Department of Defense (DOD) is desperate to curb the ever-rising suicide rate among Active Duty, Guard, Reserve and veterans of the military. The Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and each of the five component chiefs have separately addressed the issue in symposiums, seminars, and on social media. Yet, the rate keeps climbing.

As senior leaders grow more and more desperate to decrease the rate at which US service members are dying by suicide, they’ve begun to shift their tone from one of declaration (“here is how we’re going to decrease the suicide rate!”) to one of inquiry (“please, tell us what we need to do to make this happen.”).

Based on my own experience in the military, I believe that perhaps the answer lies outside DOD. It may seem that our most senior military officers do not know what is causing the rates of suicide to continue to climb within DOD, but it is more likely that the struggle lies more in knowing how to address the fundamental shift in American culture from within DOD. I want to stress that this is not in any way meant to suggest that I’m laying the blame at the feet of the Department’s leadership.

While countless articles have been written under the premise that the military suffers from a remarkably higher rate of suicide than the broader American population, the data does not support this. It is true that the average rate of suicide (typically calculated as a rate-per-100,000) shows a vast gap between military and civilian suicide rates, the average paints an inaccurate picture, because of the demographics within the military. When adjusted for age and gender, the data shows that DOD’s suicide rate is actually almost identical to the national suicide rate. Both of those rates have skyrocketed since 2001. While that’s certainly not cause for rejoicing, it is absolutely crucial to understanding, and thus impacting, the military suicide rates. The fact that the military recruits almost exclusively from the most vulnerable population group in America, in terms of likelihood of dying by suicide, is indisputable. So why aren’t the military’s senior leaders getting it? Here’s some potential reasons:

Our senior leaders represent a different era of American life.

The youngest member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is 56. Each of the Joint Chiefs has been serving for more than thirty years, or nearly twice the age of the average recruit coming through basic training. This fact is significant, not only because it demonstrates the different nature of service when each of these men was a junior officer, but beyond that, it demonstrates the significantly different America that these men grew up in.

No one, including the Joint Chiefs, would deny that America in the early 2000s was a vastly different place than America in the 1960s. So why can’t we acknowledge those differences when it comes to discussing suicide rates, both inside DOD and outside it? Is it too much to accept that the divisions, isolation, fractured family life, and rise of social media might have fundamentally altered the experience of growing up in America in ways that can make it an extremely negative one?

2. Our senior leaders still believe that service in the Armed Forces instills a sense of belonging.

As much as those who serve fervently wish this was the case, the reality is starkly different. While overseas service, particularly in combat, still instills an unshakeable sense of community amd belonging, research demonstrates that returning home and having those bonds severed due to reassignment, retirement, and leaving the service, can have a profoundly negative effect on resilience. As America has grown more isolated and divided, so too has the military. As the bonds between friends, neighbors and biological family have been splintered, so too have the bonds of military service. One has only to look at the mushrooming sexual assault crisis, the mental health crisis, and the epidemic of veteran homelessness to see that the social contract that once united service members is tattered and in shreds. Our senior leaders understand this, but for some reason, haven’t seemed to connect it to the suicide rate. Which brings us to the third point.

3. Our senior defense leaders don’t treat the problems plaguing the military holistically, because in a lot of ways, they can’t.

Each of the various negative crises impacting the Armed Forces is also impacting America as a whole, but while American society has come to terms, to varying degrees, with the interconnectedness of these crises, the military is somewhat handicapped by forces outside its control. Forces in the larger society. The military is, in many ways, forced to deal with the causes of suicide separately, rather than holistically. Each facet of the larger societal ill is treated separately, from mental health, to finances, to sexual assault, to suicide. By isolating and separating the issues, the military is succumbing to a lack of coordinated effort, that is broadly similar to the cultural lack of coordinated effort that the country as a whole is still grappling with.

The nation is not moving in a holistic direction, in understanding that each of these issues represents just one piece of the puzzle, and neither is the military, which is still forced by funding, outdated research and the conflicting interests of national security and compassionate mental health services, to use a “divide-and-conquer” approach.

4. Attempts to reduce the stigma of getting help have proven ineffective.

Within the military, there is a requirement to disclose numerous facets of medical information to supervision that is not replicated in civilian life. One of those facets is mental health and suicidal ideations. As a result, while the military has made frequent attempts to decrease the stigma, the fact that individuals seeking help for their mental health issues is a matter of command and supervisory knowledge is hampering those attempts. While there is a lingering stigma in the corporate world as well, it is not exacerbated by the fact that employers and bosses know exactly when, where, and why their employees are being seen by mental health professionals.

I would argue, in fact, that until mental health services move off bases and away from the routine purview of military leadership across the chain of command, there will be no appreciative increase in use of the services that do exist. We further contend that the current “get back in the fight” mentality that is applied equally to both physical care and mental care needs to be drastically altered. High quality, long-term mental health care needs to be more readily available to those who struggle with PTSD, trauma and suicidal tendencies, rather than the current model, which focuses on short-term treatment to quickly return the member to service.