For the 2nd year in a row, more US troops lost to suicide than combat.

by bkudria on 1/27/2011, 2:29 AM with 2 comments
  • by greenyoda on 1/27/2011, 7:01 AM

    It's a pretty uninformative article, since it doesn't even tell you whether the military suicide rate is higher or lower than the rate in the general population. Being suspicious of the media, I did a little bit of digging, and it turns out there's a good reason why they don't tell you the rates in the general population. Because then it would be good news instead of bad news!

    Statistics for U.S. suicides in 2001: - Males: 17.6 suicides per 100,000 population. - Females: 4.1 - Overall: 10.8 (The rate is much higher for males than females, since females have more unsuccessful attempts; men use guns more often, women use pills.) Source: http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html

    And from the following reference, we can get the per-capita rate for various branches of the military:

    http://ptsdcombat.blogspot.com/2010/04/latest-military-comba...

    Quote: << Eleven active-duty airmen had committed suicide through March 19, which projects to an annual rate of 13.7 suicides per 100,000 airmen. The numbers were already trending upward: The 2008 and 2009 rates were 12.4 and 12.5, after averaging fewer than 10 from 1998 through 2007. By comparison, the Army and Marine Corps had rates last year of 23 and 24. The Navy has not released its 2009 rate, but Air Force Times calculated it at 14.5 using data released by the service. The civilian suicide rate was 10.9 in 2006, the last year for which data are available. ... >>

    But we should really compare against the suicide rate for men, since soldiers are predominantly men. So we have:

    - General population of men: 17.6 / 100,000 - Air Force: 13.7 / 100,000 - Army-Marines: 23-24 / 100,000 - Navy: 14.5 / 100,000

    So, other than the Army/Marines, the military suicide rate is LOWER than that of the general male population, and for Army/Marines, the suicide rate is only 36% higher than the general population. This may be attributable to the fact that guys in the Army almost certainly kill themselves with guns, so we'd expect their success rate to be higher than that of the general population.

  • by nandemo on 1/27/2011, 3:15 AM

    How's that a bad thing? It means few soldiers are getting killed in combat. In fact, for most armies suicide is a bigger cause of death than combat, simply because most countries aren't in state of war.