If you are American (and yes I mean the USA) and you have a friend, spouse or family member in the military, you should read this paper. It is open access: read the entire thing.
If you have friends and family who are in other militaries, you should also read this paper. Because the US military is big, and they have to publish their findings.
And because too many servicemen die by their own hand.
I have quoted from the discussion: ND means non deployed, CD means currently deployed, SA means suicide attempt. PTSD is post traumatic stress disorder and SUD is substance use disorder. You cannot stop the USMIL from using anacronyms.
To our knowledge, SA has rarely been studied with data as comprehensive as available for these analyses. The findings highlight the importance of life and career history in understanding SAs in soldiers and the complexity of risk and protective factors across contexts. We found the highest rates of SA were among ND soldiers and those in their first years of service. Future research should examine the degree to which this risk is accounted for by those who recently entered service. Prior studies found that female soldiers are more likely than male soldiers to make a medically documented or self-reported SA. We found this effect across all deployment contexts, with CD women having the highest odds of SA relative to men. Although men are more likely to die by suicide in any deployment context, this pattern of increased risk among CD women has also been observed for suicide death. Further research is required to understand factors that may contribute to these sex differences: occupational differences among those deployed, variation in social support by DS, the role of sexual assault or harassment, or sex differences in response to deployment-related stressors.
The association of mental health diagnosis with suicidal behaviors is well established. We found that the magnitude of this association across deployment contexts increased with recent diagnosis. This pattern was observed for a history of any mental health diagnosis and specifically for depression, PTSD, and SUD. This finding is consistent with evidence that 75% of service members had contact with the health care system in the month prior to a self-inflicted injury.30 Although the importance of recent diagnosis may be expected because it is a potential indicator of acuity, it also highlights the challenges of prevention even among soldiers identified as having psychiatric risk. Posttraumatic stress disorder, SUD, and depression each increased risk even after adjusting for the other disorders.
The higher risk among ND soldiers in their second month of service, a stressful time during basic training and Army acculturation, reinforces the importance of developing and evaluating effective risk detection and intervention strategies early in a soldier’s career. Whether this risk pattern was associated with expanded Army recruitment during war or anticipated deployments or is a persistent pattern of risk among soldiers in training remains to be determined.
Wome soldiers are being more likely to kill themselves is unusual: the only other group I know where that happens is within the People’s Republic of China. In the general population, men kill themselves more frequently than women. But women are a minority within the military, so more males die than females.
I’m a civilian. I assume that there is some screening out of the psychologically vulnerable or less fit from the combat specialities, and that these personel are less likely to be deployed: where I live the military is very small, and if you serve, you will be deployed. But we test those who apply for service, and only take the best.
What this does show, however, is that those soldiers who don’t have depression, substance abuse, or PTSD are at much lower risk. The memes that all servicemen are suicidal and all those deployed are damaged are simply wrong. They need to be confronted.
For those who serve their nation should be honoured, not shamed.
It looks like the quote indicates that women have more suicide attempts, not more suicide successes. Which holds true for the female population generally–when women attempt suicide, they opt for less lethal methods that tend to leave them alive the next day. Men opt for more lethal methods that leave no room for survival.
Aside from the possibilities of basic training being highly stressful and, as you point out, the more psychologically fit folks being sent out on deployment, there may just be a time aspect: the folks who are likely to commit suicide go ahead and do it, and by the time the soldiers are deployed, the less-suicidal ones are left.
I don’t know if enlisted men actually commit suicide at any higher rates than other men with similar backgrounds. But for many of them, I think the armed forces represent a way out of tough life circumstances–and sometimes it’s hard to really escape those circumstances.