Army Declares New All-Out "War" on Soldier Suicide - Saving Traumatized Heroes Lives
In March of 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin established the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, to better understand and therefore prevent soldier suicide.
KRIS OSBORN, WARRIOR MAVEN - CENTER FOR MILITARY MODERNIZATIONAPR 24, 2023
“Understanding of the whole person and ensuring that the whole person is equipped to face what we are asking them to do. We are inviting people into a loving community and we are asking a lot of them, so we must prepare them for their very worst day,”.......... MG Thomas Solhjem, 25th Army Chief of Chaplains
(Washington DC) US Army post-combat soldier suicides are unspeakably traumatic, devastating and tragic, as they often both end lives with unwanted violence and shatter other lives with loss and life-long pain and confusion. Perhaps no-one can fully comprehend or analyze the ineffable mixture of variables which ultimately cause such tragedy, yet the complexity of the task has not slowed down what could be described as the Army’s increasingly intense “war on suicide.”
Suicide prevention and resilience, long emphasized in the Army, has taken on new urgency in recent decades during and after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin writes, “one death by suicide is too many.” The numbers of veteran suicides are alarming, as they have increased massively in the last several decades since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. An interesting essay from the American Addiction Centers reports that, in 2020, there were 6,146 veteran suicides, an average of 16.8 per day.
“Additionally, in the two decades between 2001 and 2020, the prevalence of mental health or substance use disorder (SUD) among participants using Veterans Health Administration (VHA) rose from 27.9% to 41.9%,” the essay states.
https://warriormaven.com/land/army-soldier-suicide
