A Lesser-Known Group At Risk of Suicide—Children of Servicemembers
APRIL 15, 2020| DAN RABB
Geoffrey Davis lost count of how many times he attempted suicide.
His relatives described him as “the stereotypical boy next door,” an athletic teenager who hardly seemed like a troubled Army brat. To his family, friends, and teachers, Davis was a well-liked soccer player and member of his high school’s Army Junior ROTC in El Paso, Texas. The son of a 12B combat engineer, he succeeded as a student even as the Army moved his family to Texas from their southeastern Michigan home after his freshman year of high school.
He even became a pillar of stability for his mother in anxious times, as his father, an explosives expert, was sent into harm’s way for months-long training exercises, as well as a year-long deployment to Iraq.
But Davis was in crisis. Suffering from undiagnosed depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, he would lock himself in his bedroom and try to take his own life. Sometimes he tried to hang himself. Other times he would sit with the muzzle of his father’s loaded shotgun in his mouth. He drank and swallowed handfuls of opioids at night and hoped to never wake up. Yet every morning he did, heading off to school like nothing was wrong. Davis, now 26, calls it a miracle that he survived long enough to be forced into treatment his sophomore year of college.
https://thewarhorse.org/a-lesser-known-group-at-risk-of-suicide-children-of-servicemembers/
