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Army Analyzes GI Suicide Rate
In releasing survey's results Thursday, the Army also said its mental health specialists in Iraq were constrained in helping distressed soldiers because of shortages of anti-depressant and sleeping drugs, inadequate training in combat stress control and ill-defined standards of care.
From April through December last year, 23 soldiers killed themselves in Iraq or Kuwait. The cause of death in three other suspected suicide cases is still under investigation. The 23 total equates to a rate of 17.3 suicides per 100,000 soldiers, which compares to an Army-wide rate last year of 12.8.
Of the 23 who killed themselves, all but two were males. Gunshot was the method of killing in all but one case, which was a result of drug overdose. The peak months were July, with five suicides, and November with four. So far this year, there has been only one confirmed suicide, according to Col. Bruce E. Crow, a member of the Iraq survey team and a specialist in suicide prevention.
At least seven other soldiers killed themselves last year after returning to the United States.
Among the survey's findings:
"It was a pretty miserable set of circumstances" facing soldiers there last summer, said Col. Virgil J. Patterson III, a social work officer who headed a 12-member team of psychologists and other mental health professionals who spent several weeks in Iraq and Kuwait last August through October.
At the time Patterson's team conducted its private interviews of 756 soldiers, living conditions in Iraq were harsh. Many soldiers had not yet been moved from tents to buildings with air conditioning; uncertainty about length of service in Iraq was widespread, and the anti-occupation insurgency that took hold in July was still killing one or two American soldiers a day.
Complicating matters was an inadequate system of mental health support, the Army report said.
More than half of mental health providers whose mission was "combat stress control" told Patterson's team that they had inadequate supplies of anti-depressant and sleeping drugs. Half said they did not receive enough prewar training in combat stress, and more than half said they either did not know the Army's combat stress control doctrine or "did not support it."
The Army report, months in the making, praised the professionalism of its mental health specialists, who accepted risk in performing their duties. But it also said they lacked key resources.
"There was an unmet need for behavioral services," said the report.
Dr. Paul Ragan, an associate professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and a former Navy psychiatrist, said in a telephone interview Thursday that last year's 23 suicides among the soldiers in Iraq is "without question a highly statistically significant elevation of the number of suicides."
"This is a milestone," he said.
The overall U.S. civilian suicide rate during 2001 was 10.7 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. civilian rate for the 18-34 age group - the age range of most soldiers - is 21.5 per 100,000.
Patterson said his assessment team's visit to Iraq was the first time in the Army's history that such an effort was made in a combat zone. Thus, there is no comparative date from past wars on such issues as morale, stress and other mental health indicators.
By Robert Burns