Don't wanna take up too much of your time…
The US Army released their suicide statistics for December.
There were 160 reported active-duty Army suicides during 2009. Of these, 114 have been confirmed, and 46 are pending determination of manner of death. During 2008, there were 140 suicides among active-duty soldiers.
Okay, back to what we were doing.
How do the numbers compare against suicide rates of the same age group of non-military?
according to wikipedia, 11.1 per every 100,000 Americans committed suicide in 2005. a google search showed that the rate of suicide in America has increased substantially in the last ten years, with ’09 apparently being a record breaker especially amongst middle-aged women, which is interesting. @Jason, do you suppose this is normal? Or that 7 years of perpetual combat has not had its effects on the morale of our armed forces?
And these are only the suicides that are recognized by the army as such. These numbers do not include–though for the sake of comparison, they have never included–all of the suicides that are classified as “accidents,” “friendly fire,” or a variety of other causes of death.
Justin,
Thanks for the information. I don’t know either way how it is affected morale, though I’m sure not for the better. I didn’t mean to be skeptical about the information. The only thing is when statistics like these are released, I personally thionk it’s needed to compare across age group. The point being that while a number of these suicides could be directly related to combat action in the military, there are possible additional factors involved.
The middle-aged women statistic – is that in the military or Americans overall?
Americans overall, if you google ‘united states suicide rates 2009’ most of the links are about the rise in suicides in the last decades, and many of them mention that middle-aged women have had the sharpest increase.
sorry, *decade