Health
No Link Between Suicide and Military Deployments
Soldiers of the U.S. Army 23rd Chemical Battalion. (Lee Jin-man/AP)
(The American Register) – The largest study till date on the rising suicide rate among military personnel is published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association found no connection between suicide and deployment overseas to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These findings are the latest in a series of studies that were triggered by a military suicide rate that had doubled up since 2005. The authors of the study and other researchers cautioned that the findings don’t rule out combat exposure as a reason for increase in suicide rates.
“As the wars went on, the suicide rates also went up and it was very tempting to assume deployments must be the reason,” said the lead author, Mark Reger of the Department of Defense National Center for Telehealth and Technology in Tacoma, Wash. “Our data don’t support that. But there may be important subgroups, including those exposed to combat, that we need to look at further.”
