A military report on suicide rates broken down by occupation finds the highest rates among categories of troops that often work and train around weapons blasts.
Pentagon researchers are studying the effects of blasts from weapons like shoulder-fired rocket launchers on the brains of troops who use them. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Timeson finds the highest rates among categories of troops that often work and train around weapons blasts.
Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/us/military-suicide-rates-report.html
Troops whose jobs can expose them repeatedly to blasts have among the highest suicide rates in the armed forces, according to a new report by the Defense Department.
The report, released on Wednesday, lists the suicide rates for each military occupational specialty between 2011 and 2022.
Explosive ordnance disposal team members, who disable roadside bombs and routinely train and work around very large blasts, had the highest suicide rate — 34.77 deaths per 100,000 people per year — followed by infantry and special operations forces; armor crews; and artillery troops; whose rates are closer to 30 deaths per 100,000.
The current national rate for civilians is about 14 deaths per 100,000 per year.
The report released on Wednesday does not mention blast exposure as a factor, and offers no insights into what may be contributing to the different suicide rates. Still, the correlation between deaths by suicide and levels of blast exposure is a common theme in the figures.
Defense Department studies suggest that most blast exposure happens in training, not combat.
In the Air Force, where blast exposure is rare, there were no significant differences in suicide rates among different military occupations. But among Army and Marine Corps troops, the rates are elevated wherever blasts are part of daily work.
“This comes as no surprise,” said Chuck Stansberry, a recently retired Navy master chief who worked in explosive ordnance disposal for most of his career. “I can’t tell you how many guys I know who have died of suicide.”
Troops in his career field train around blasts on almost a weekly basis, and can be exposed to blasts of 1,000 pounds, he said. While they are required by safety guidelines to keep their distance to avoid having their eardrums blown out, the guidelines take no account of blast exposure risk to their brains.
Blast exposure has long been a misunderstood hazard, Mr. Stansberry said, adding that by the end of his career, he was grappling with sleeplessness, depression and severe memory problems.
“A lot of us are like that,” he said. “It’s not psychological — there is something physiologically wrong. And a lot of guys struggle.”
The report said that 5,997 service members died by suicide between 2011 and 2022 — more than six times the number killed in combat during the same period.
Eight Navy SEALs who died by suicide in the last 10 years, and whose brains were then studied in a specialized laboratory, all showed characteristic signs of damage caused by repeated blast exposure, an investigation by The New York Times found.
The overall suicide rate in the military has been increasing for 20 years. The stresses of war were long thought to be a driving factor in the increase, but the trend has continued even as the combat tempo has ebbed over the last decade, leaving many military leaders perplexed.
The Defense Department report was initiated by Senator Angus King of Maine, who released the findings on Wednesday. In a statement, Mr. King said he hoped the data would guide the military “in its efforts to curb suicide rates and hopefully save lives.”
Legislation introduced by Mr. King that is pending in Congress would require the military to start releasing data on suicide by career field each year.
Mr. King and 10 other senators sent a letter in May to Congressional leaders expressing their concern that shock waves from weapons blasts may be causing brain injuries that go unrecognized by the military. “We need to better understand the potential physical, cognitive and behavioral impacts that exposure to these shock waves can have on service members,” the letter said.
Suicide is complex and rarely hinges on a single factor, but a number of studies, including some funded by the Defense Department, have shown that traumatic brain injuries can increase the risk.
Even so, for decades the military largely overlooked the risk to brain health posed by the blast waves from weapons fired during training. Only in the last few years, when forced by Congress, has the military taken action on the issue.
The new report shows heightened suicide rates in some military occupations that are not obviously exposed to blasts, like medical care providers and radio operators. However, troops in those occupations — including combat medics — are sometimes embedded in combat units, where they may be exposed to many of the same stresses and blast waves as combat troops, even though they are counted separately in the report.
Because the report does not break out data on individual specialties within each broad career field, troops who may be at very high risk, like mortar teams, may be lost in the figures for the larger categories to which they belong, like infantry.
“This report is a good first step,” Ms. Kuzminski said. “It provides us the data to start asking the right questions. But there are still a lot of questions.”
Chief among them, she said, is how exposure to repeated blasts from weapons affects suicide risk.
The military does not track the blast exposure of individual service members, so it does not have data to show whether exposure erodes mental health.
Wearable blast sensors have been available for more than a decade, and have sometimes been employed by the military in field research. Thousands of soldiers wore them in Afghanistan as part of a study of brain injuries from roadside bombs and enemy attacks. The data revealed that a vast majority of blasts that the troops were exposed to came not from enemy action but from soldiers’ own weapons. The research program was shelved a short time later.
Special Operations Command, which oversees Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, among others, is in the final stages of issuing wearable blast gauges to all its operators. Congress recently required the rest of the military to begin tracking blast exposure in all other troops, but the military is considering using computer modeling to assign doses to troops, instead of issuing millions of individual gauges.
Mr. Card’s case shows the limitations of analyzing risk of blast exposure through a soldier’s career field. To the Army, Mr. Card was officially a petroleum supply specialist — an occupation not at all associated with weapons blasts. But despite that career designation, he worked for years as a grenade instructor, where his brain was exposed to blasts by the thousands.
Army investigators said in a recent report that they saw no link between Mr. Card’s service in the Army Reserve and his deteriorating mental health.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Dave Philipps writes about war, the military and veterans and covers The Pentagon. More about Dave Philipps