Media Celebrates Armed Forces Suicide Rate

The mainstream media is again playing with numbers to attack the war effort and the troops, bringing out an alarmist article about record high suicide rates in the Armed Forces (Soldier suicides hit highest rate, 115 last year). Any suicide, either civilian or military, is a tragedy - it's shameful to attack the war effort in such a transparent way. I say that it's an intentional attack because of the way the article is formated - it leaves out very important statistics that put the military numbers into context until well into the story (the very end in the version that showed up in my paper, the Providence Journal), and does so in a sly way in order to question the legitimacy of the statistic ("The Army said..."). It also doesn't give you enough demographic information to allow readers to do a little investigating by themselves. Here's the lede:

WASHINGTON - Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007 at the highest rate on record, and the toll is climbing ever higher this year as long war deployments stretch on. At least 115 soldiers killed themselves last year, up from 102 the previous year, the Army said Thursday.

Nearly a third of them died at the battlefront — 32 in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. But 26 percent had never deployed to either conflict.

Here are paragraphs 8 and 9:

Increasing the strain on the force last year was the extension of deployments to 15 months from 12 months, a practice ending this year.

The 115 confirmed suicides among active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated amounted to a rate of 18.8 per 100,000 troops — the highest since the Army began keeping records in 1980. Two other deaths are suspected suicides but still under investigation.

And here's paragraphs 15 and 16, which puts everything into perspective. Even with the increased number, the suicide rate for the Armed Forces appears to be slightly lower than that of rate for the general population in the same demographic group. In addition, the military suicide rate rise since 1980 isn't unique to that group - it's also been rising in the general population. Also note that the author leads the relevant statistics with a much lower statistic revealing suicide rates of the overall population. That's bound to be much lower, since the demographic group for the highest suicide rates, in or out of the military, is younger adults - especially males. They do that to heighten the drama, apparently:

Suicides have been rising nearly each year of the five-year-old war in Iraq and the nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan. The 115 deaths last year and 102 in 2006 followed 85 in 2005 and 67 in 2004. The rate of 18.8 per 100,000 last year compared to a rate of 17.5 in 2006 and 9.8 in 2002 — the first full year after the start of the war in Afghanistan.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the suicide rate for U.S. society overall was about 11 per 100,000 in 2004, the latest year for which the agency has figures. The Army said that when civilian rates are adjusted to cover the same age and gender mix that exists in the Army, the civilian rate is more like 19.5 per 100,000.

Even those paragraphs are not accurate. The last year that we have national suicide numbers for is 2005, as even a cursory search on the Internet will show. And we don't know the demographics used, which would be helpful.

Unfortunately, I have close personal experiences with suicides and suicide attempts, which is why I take this stuff so seriously. You'd be surprised at how many suicides occur even in your own neighborhoods. Also, I have close police friends who sometimes share with me their first respondent stories. That's why whenever I see an obituary, particularly one of a younger person, that starts off with "so-and-so died unexpectedly at home" I say an extra prayer - often those are the suicides. Not publishing it as such is not really a cover-up - it's done to protect the survivors and friends, and the appropriate authorities know what happened. Parents, in particular, don't need the fact that a child committed suicide plastered all over the news.

Suicide is a terrible, terrible thing. The media shouldn't play politics with it.