Are combat veterans more prone to suicide?

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By Mary McCarty and Tom Beyerlein
Staff Writers Updated 2:11 AM Sunday, April 25, 2010

That’s a controversy that has heated up as the United States last year lost almost as many military personnel to suicide as to combat.

In November, the nonpartisan Congressional Quarterly reported that more active-duty military personnel committed suicide (334) in 2009 as of Nov. 24 than were killed in Afghanistan (297) or Iraq (144) that year. The Army’s active-duty suicide rate doubled from nine per 100,000 in 2001 to 20.2 per 100,000 in 2008, a number comparable with the general population. And those figures don’t take into account veterans like Jesse Huff who have been discharged from active service.

Historically, military suicide rates have been 20 percent to 30 percent lower than for the general U.S. population, according to a study published in the August 2008 Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the JAMA study of Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans who were discharged between October 2001 and December 2005, 21.9 per 100,000 committed suicide, slightly higher than the rate for the U.S. population when standardized for factors including age, gender and race. But that number jumps to 31 per 100,000, 77 percent higher than the general population, among veterans who suffer from mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Ethan Bean, a staff psychiatrist in the primary care clinic at the Dayton VA Medical Center, said combat soldiers may be in a higher-risk category because men are six times more likely to commit suicide than women. “A lot of veterans also possess firearms, so they have easy access to that method of suicide,” he added.

Bean said the leading indicators for suicide are depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder and substance abuse. “What we usually see when we do our research is that it’s not just one of those (factors),” Bean said. “Everything is tied together.”

How to get help: Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255. The phone is manned 24 hours a day by VA staffers who make referrals to local mental-health providers.

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