WASHINGTON, 17 August 2007 — A new military report released yesterday found that US Army soldiers are committing suicide at the highest rate in 26 years. More than one-fourth of the army soldiers committed suicide while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, it said.
The report came the same week that an internal State Department study concluded that up to 17 percent of US diplomats at dangerous posts abroad may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Data Center, which collects data for the Pentagon, said there were 99 confirmed suicides among active duty soldiers during 2006, up from 88 the previous year and the highest number since the 102 suicides in 1991 at the time of the Gulf War.
About twice as many women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide as did women not sent to war, the report said.
In a half million-person army, last year’s suicide toll translates to a rate of 17.3 per 100,000, the highest in the past 26 years, officials report. The rate has fluctuated over those years, with the low being 9.1 per 100,000 in 2001.
The increases for 2006 came as army officials worked to set up a number of new and stronger programs for providing mental health care to a force strained by the longer-than-expected war in Iraq and the global counterterrorism war entering its sixth year.
In a flurry of studies in recent months, officials found that system that might have been adequate for a peacetime military has been overwhelmed by troops coming home from the wars.
Some troop surveys in Iraq have shown that 20 percent of army soldiers have signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, which can cause flashbacks of traumatic combat experiences and other severe reactions. About 35 percent of soldiers are seeking some kind of mental health treatment a year after returning home under a program that screens returning troops for physical and mental health, officials have said.
The army has sent medical teams annually to the battlefront in Iraq to survey troops, health care providers and chaplains about health, morale and other issues. It has revised training programs, bolstered suicide prevention, is adding some 25 percent more psychiatrists and other mental health professionals to its staff and is in the midst of an extensive program to teach all soldiers how to recognize mental health problems in themselves and their comrades — and encourage them to seek help.
“In addition, there was a significant relationship between suicide attempts and number of days deployed” in Iraq, Afghanistan or nearby countries where troops are participating in the war effort, it said. The same pattern seemed to hold true for those who not only attempted, but succeeded in killing themselves.
There also “was limited evidence to support the view that multiple...deployments are a risk factor for suicide behaviors,” it said.
The leading causes of suicide, the report cites, are failed personal financial problems, job stress and legal issues. The report also cites a “significant relationship” in suicide attempts and duration of which the soldiers were deployed.
Preliminary figures for the first half of this year indicated that the number of troop suicides could decline across the service but increase among soldiers inside war zones during 2007, officials said.
There was “limited evidence” to back the suspicion that repeated deployments are putting more people at risk for suicide, the report said.
With the army stretched thin by years of fighting the two wars, the Pentagon has had to extend normal tours of duty this year to 15 months from 12 and has sent some troops back to the wars several times.
