A misunderstood statistic: 22 military veteran suicides a day

In most discussions of suicide and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including the online buzz that followed publication of a Times analysis on how young California veterans die — one statistic gets repeated most: 22 veterans kill themselves each day.

That number comes from a study published in early 2013 by researchers at the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. But the recent wars were not the study's primary focus. In fact, they play a minor role in veteran suicides overall.

The VA researchers used death records from 21 states to come up with a 2010 national estimate for veterans of all ages. As a group, veterans are old. Military service being far rarer than it was in the days of the draft, more than 91% of the nation's 22 million veterans are at least 35 years old, and the overwhelming majority did not serve in the post-9/11 era.

About 72% of veterans are at least 50. It is not surprising, then, that the VA found that people in this age group account for 69% of veteran suicides — or more than 15 of the 22 per day.


Many experts believe that the farther a veteran is from military service, the less likely it is that his or her suicide has anything to do with his or her time in uniform. In other words, many older veterans are killing themselves for the same reasons that other civilians in the same age group kill themselves: depression and other mental health problems coupled with difficult life circumstances.

The VA analysis does not attempt to determine rates of veteran suicide or how they compare with rates for people who never served. Those are surprisingly difficult questions to answer, mainly because the government does not systematically track service members after they leave the military.

The Times tackled the problem using data on California deaths from 2006 to 2011, the most recent six years available. Rather than focus exclusively on suicide, the analysis considered all 42,734 deaths of adults under 35, a group that includes those veterans most likely to have served in the recent wars.

In addition to the cause of death and a variety of other information, each record includes a box indicating veteran status. In the course of reporting, it became clear that the local coroners and funeral home directors who fill out the forms also use that box for active-duty deaths. The Armed Forces Medical Examiner System provided data on active-duty deaths in California by age, gender and cause, allowing The Times to subtract those figures and arrive at the veteran totals.

The VA provided the California veteran population estimates that The Times used to calculate overall death rates and break them down by cause. The death rates for other civilians were determined using population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

One more step was required to make the comparisons relevant. California veterans under 35 are about 80% male, and nearly half are over 29. A straight comparison to the general population in that age group would be less than ideal, since suicide and accident rates vary significantly by gender and age.

The Times adjusted the non-veteran death rates so they reflected the age and gender mix of the veteran population.

As the story explained, suicide and accident rates were substantially higher for veterans. Over the six years examined by The Times, 329 California veterans under 35 took their own lives. That amounts to an average annual rate of 27 suicides per 100,000 veterans.

If that rate were to hold true across the country, about 530 young veterans are committing suicide each year — roughly 1.5 each day.

That's probably an underestimate, because there are regional variations in suicide and California tends to fall on the low side. But in talking about the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's far closer to reality than 22 each day.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/20/science/la-sci-sn-veteran-suicide-statistics-20131219


The Truth About 22 Veteran Suicides A Day

While the suicide rate among veterans from operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom is still too high, it’s not 22 a day.


There is a statistic that has been widely quoted in the veteran community that highlights an estimated 22 veterans a day are committing suicide. It is a deeply troubling statistic and has galvanized the veteran movement, both from inside the military and veteran communities, and externally, to bring about a wide range of programming nationwide. The statistic, however, is widely misunderstood.

This figure — 22 veterans a day commit suicide — while widely touted by politicians, media outlets, veterans service organizations, among others, comes from the VA’s 2012 Suicide Data Report, which analyzed the death certificates of 21 states from 1999 to 2011, and often is not provided within the right context. The report itself, as cited by the Washington Post earlier this year, warned, “It is recommended that the estimated number of veterans be interpreted with caution due to the use of data from a sample of states and existing evidence of uncertainty in veteran identifiers on U.S. death certificates.” As an example, the average age of veteran suicides within the data set was nearly 60 years old, not representative of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans generation.

A more recent study, which surveyed 1.3 million veterans who were discharged between 2001 and 2007, found that “Between 2001 and 2009, there were 1650 deployed veterans and 7703 non-deployed veteran deaths. Of those, 351 were suicides among deployed veterans and 1517 were suicides among non-deployed veterans. That means over nine years, there was not quite one veteran suicide a day,” according to the Washington Post.

While veterans have a suicide rate 50% higher than those who did not serve in the military, the rate of suicide was, as the LA Times reported, “…slightly higher among veterans who never deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, suggesting that the causes extend beyond the trauma of war.”

Coming home from war, a six-month deployment on a ship, or simply transitioning from a life in uniform to a life without one, can be difficult and the various state and federal systems set up to deal with this transition and life after military services are unable to meet the need. That is not to say these programs — the Veterans Affairs entitlement and benefit programs like medical care, the G.I. Bill, the VA Home Loan, etc. — are not helpful; they are. But, for my generation of veterans from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, our suicide rate is closer to one a day and most likely to occur in the first three years of return. While this this is still very troubling, it is not 22.

Still, there are further steps needed in bridging the gap created by those who serve and those who don’t. Supporting integration back into families and communities requires robust public-private partnerships. The veterans, as well as the communities they live in, are both responsible for filling or bridging that gap, though not necessarily equally.

The challenges of adjustment and transition, post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injuries, and physical disabilities, all need to be addressed especially as these things result in barriers to education, employment, health care, and overall individual well-being. Many of these needs are being met by a combination of different veteran-serving nonprofits and VA support. Unfortunately, there are still gaps in the system.

We in the veteran advocacy community need to tailor our programming, especially if we are in the business of preventing suicides, to respond to what we’ve learned from the data. One suicide is one suicide too many. Effective programming to help service members, veterans, and families transition to a positive life after service in their first three years home from service is a must.

Another requirement is fostering supportive community relationships for veterans, and really for all people, when life gets difficult as they surge past the age of 50. It also means that if we are serious about tackling the problem, we need to be creating, or rather shifting, programming specifically to address the needs of older veterans while maintaining preventative care for recently returned veterans.

As soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, we all prided ourselves in uniform on not making the emotional decision, but the right decision. As veterans, we should have the same commitment and that means we need to act within the framework of facts — in advocacy and programming. Inadvertently, we’re preying on a well-intentioned public by citing a misleading statistic to receive financial support and that’s not right.

As veterans, we’re far more resilient than we’ve given ourselves credit for. If we do our job now, and extend a helping hand to our brothers and sisters over 50, we can decrease that suicide rate, and ensure our generation avoids despair in the future.