#Committed personnel how to#
To help prevent military suicides, Suitt says focusing on how to better receive veterans back into civilian communities is a good place to focus energies. Although the recent US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan helped thrust the war back into the spotlight, he says veterans of post-9/11 wars have for the most part been returning home to a disinterested public. “What makes the War on Terror unique is that a poll in 2018 showed that 42% of voting Americans didn’t know we were still at war,” Suitt says. On top of that, there’s another issue awaiting veterans when they finally do return home to the US.
Those three factors add up to create what’s known as polytrauma, a condition that Suitt says became common among post-9/11 veterans. You want soldiers to survive-but they are being redeployed so many times, contributing to chronic pain, PTSD, and TBI.” “The crazy thing is that because of medical advances, people are surviving and being redeployed. Some soldiers, he says, have experienced between 15 and 20 IED explosions and subsequent brain injuries. “Then, people involved in an IED explosion get TBIs-these have become the signature injury of the War on Terror.” “On one hand, have the stress burden of knowing that there are IEDs everywhere,” Suitt says. Suitt says the military’s historically masculine, machismo culture affects how women are received by their peers in the military.Īnother rising trend since September 11 has been exposure of soldiers to more and more improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which has led to a significant increase in the number of soldiers and veterans experiencing traumatic brain injuries, known in shorthand as TBIs. “Seventy-one percent of female veterans are seeking therapy to treat from military sexual trauma.” “Military sexual trauma affects 55% of women and 38% of men,” he says. In his findings, published in June, he firstly points out that there’s been an increase in military sexual trauma, which he says can be complexly traumatizing because victims often have to continue working alongside their attacker. Suitt decided to look into factors specific to post-9/11 combat that might contribute to the rise. WHY HAVE MILITARY SUICIDES SPIKED SINCE 9/11? But military suicides have gone up during the War on Terror, meeting and surpassing the suicide rate among civilians. Historically, he says, data indicate that suicide rates typically go down among members of the military during wars. “I was looking at Veteran Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DoD) data, and I saw that no one had put it in terms of how bad suicide rates are getting,” Suitt says. Talking with them for his research, he was struck by their stories of trauma. While pursuing his doctorate, Suitt was studying moral injury and the role of faith in 9/11 veterans. Today, that rate is 45.9 per 100,000,” Suitt says. “Among the demographic of veterans aged 18 to 34, who most likely served in post-9/11 conflicts, the suicide rate per 100,000 was 25.5 in 2005.
While these high suicide rates can partially be attributed to the mental health toll of participating in war-exposure to trauma, stress, access to guns, difficulty returning to civilian life after duty-there are additional factors, one of the biggest being traumatic brain injury, unique to the wars stemming from 9/11, that contribute to the rising suicide rates among military members, says Thomas “Ben” Suitt, who earlier this year earned a PhD from Boston University’s graduate program in religion, specializing in the sociology of religion in the military and social ethics. That’s 30,177 active duty personnel and veterans of the post-9/11 wars who have taken their own lives. In the 20 years since the September 11 terror attacks, four times as many deaths among members of the military have been caused by suicide compared to those killed in action.
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