Colorado Army post says suicide rate is falling

[unhappycamper]

Colorado Army post says suicide rate is falling
By DAN ELLIOTT (AP) – 17 hours ago

FORT CARSON, Colo. — The suicide rate among soldiers at Fort Carson is on track to drop by about 45 percent this year compared with 2008, as the U.S. military takes steps to ease what has been an increasing problem.

Commanders at the Colorado Army post said Wednesday they were trying to determine reasons for the decline and cautioned the rate could climb in the months ahead.

"There is not a silver bullet," post commander Maj. Gen. David G. Perkins told a meeting of military and civilian mental health experts. "I can't point to one single thing."

However, a campaign to make mental health experts more accessible to soldiers and to reduce the stigma associated with seeking help might be among the factors behind the drop, said Brig. Gen. Jim Pasquarette, deputy commanding general for support at the base.

Most of the Fort Carson soldiers who recently took their own lives were considered good soldiers, Perkins said. Few had problems with drugs or alcohol. Three-quarters had no criminal record in the Army, and 85 percent had no financial problems.

[Iterate]

1. I'm going to call BS on this one.

The Maj. Gen. has made one of the more cringe-worthy statements I have heard in quite some time.

"There is not a silver bullet...I can't point to one single thing." is not something one would normally say to a group of mental health experts when discussing suicide in the military.

Then there is his emphatic reminder that the victims had no criminal record and were good soldiers. OK, well since those two things have nothing to do with suicide, we can assume that the good commander knows little about suicide and hasn't been the beneficiary of any new and sudden understanding.

In that he's in good company, as suicide is not well understood even in the health professions. What we can say, in 25 words or less, is that it is the consequence of either trauma or one of three mental illnesses, and the biology is not well understood. All else is cultural myth.

Now the numbers. To say there was a drop of 45% and to characterize this by the number of deaths per 100,000 is inherently misleading -especially without the actual(small) number of deaths and the individual circumstances. He uses a demographic number to suggest that his program might be working. But demographics are a one-way street -they cannot be used to understand the particulars.

So, what's the program? A clue, it's not a multi-billion dollar set of studies, funded through the military and NIH, to discovery the neurochemistry of why these certain illnesses kill 35,000 Americans each year. No, they have a mission statement, a hotline, some talk, and few briefings. Wow, very advanced for 1969.