U.S. Air Force photo illustration/Airman 1st Class Corey Hook
That U.S. veterans struggle with brain injuries, mental health conditions and suicide is not news. Military service was, before 2008, a protective factor against suicide, with troops having lower rates than their civilian counterparts. But since that year, which coincided with a surge in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, suicide rates have risen steadily, despite enormous efforts by the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to prevent the deaths.
The retrospective study, published Monday in JAMA Neurology, appears to show that those multimillion-dollar suicide prevention initiatives and programs have had little impact. "We were pretty stunned, honestly. Even though this is just a descriptive analysis, the trends are so alarming we felt we needed to report it as soon as possible," said Jeffrey Howard, an associate professor of public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio who led the study.
The study looked at the records of military veterans who served on active duty after Sept. 11, 2001, and had received three years of medical care through the military health system or at least two years at the VA. The researchers found that from 2006 to 2020, 8,262 veterans died by suicide while 562,411 civilians died by suicide, which translate – a rate of roughly 42 per 100,000 for veterans versus roughly 18 per 100,000 for the general population when looking at the groups across the 15-year time frame.
The rates were highest among those ages 35 to 44, followed closely by the 25- to 34-year-old group, and among Native and Alaskan Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and veterans with traumatic brain injury. The findings build on work published in February 2022, also by Howard, that found veterans with even mild traumatic brain injury, as well as those with moderate to severe injuries, were more likely to die by suicide, accidents or homicides than their counterparts who had never received blows to the head.
In an email Monday to Military.com, Howard said his researchers published the brief because they had received an update of the national death index data through 2020 and the group was interested to see how the rates may have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. But when they looked at the rate trend, what "really stood out was just how dramatically they had increased over the past 15 years."
SOURCE: Military.com