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IPFS News Link • Military

Why Soldiers Keep Losing to Suicide

• Sarah Childress, Frontline

Most soldiers who take their own lives today have no history of deployment. They’ve never seen combat, never been to war.

Nobody really knows why.

And although the military’s suicide problem flared during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so far it doesn’t seem to be ending with them.

About 53 percent of those who died by suicide in the military in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, had no history of deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, according (pdf) to the Defense Department. And nearly 85 percent of military members who took their lives had no direct combat history, meaning they may have been deployed but not seen action.

 

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by Ernest Ryan
Entered on:

 Maybe the reason we are losing so many soldiers to suicide who actually were not in combat is that 20-30% of our military is now on combinations of antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs that have been proven to cause some people to experience violent and suicidal thoughts and actions. All these Columbine and Sandy Hook type murder/suicides were committed by people who were under psychiatric care and on psychiatric drugs. Check out what Michael Moore now thinks was the cause of Columbine at. The more we treat soldiers with PTSD by giving them drugs proven to  cause suicide, the more soldiers we will see committing suicide. So every time a solider commits suicide, the mental health people say we need to make mental health treatment more widely available which results in more people on drugs that cause some people to become violent and/or commit suicide. It's like pouring gasoline on a fire to put it out. Look for many more of these fires in the form of more and bigger military suicides. Does anyone really think the army major who was also a psychiatrist suffering from depression (who murdered all those soldiers at Fort Hood) was not on antidepressants and/or antipsychotics. He frequently wrote prescriptions to put soldiers on these drugs to treat their PTSD and depression. Would he not self-medicate to handle his own depression. Oh, I forgot, he killed all those people because he was a Muslim. As long as the media wants to come up with the wrong answers to this problem, the problem will continue and it is continuing.



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