This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 24, 2013 - In 2012, more members of the U.S. armed forces died by their own hand than were killed in combat operations. Suicide claimed 349 military lives, while 295 troops died prosecuting the attenuated mission in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta characterizes suicide within the ranks as an epidemic, and the Pentagon continues to address the problem as a top priority.
The profile of a typical decedent is a white male under 25 from the lower enlisted ranks without a college education. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule.
The usual reasons cited for the alarming increase in self-murder include the strain on personnel from repeated war zone deployments, difficulty readjusting to the routine of garrison life after combat, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol or substance abuse, marital difficulties and “anxiety over the prospect of being forced out of a shrinking force.”
At first blush, all of these common, sensible explanations sound reasonable, if somewhat inexact. (Excessive drinking/illicit drug use, for instance, may be as much a symptom as it is a cause.) But a further examination of the data makes one wonder if the obvious may not be misleading in this case.
More than a decade of warfare has undoubtedly stressed the military establishment, but the soldier who commits suicide is killing himself, not the Defense Department. Indeed, only 8 percent of last year’s suicides had experienced multiple combat deployments, so the length of conflict should not have impacted most victims personally.
PTSD is both real and serious but only 15 percent of suicides had “direct combat experience” and only 10 percent of these tragic incidents occurred in theaters of active warfare. In all, 47 percent of decedents had served in some capacity in a war zone— which means that 53 percent had never been deployed. Explanations that fail to account for more than half of the studied phenomena must necessarily be considered incomplete.
By the middle of the last decade, the problem of military suicide had been called front and center at the Pentagon. Intervention efforts were intensified and emphasis was put on de-stigmatizing the call for help. “Buddy-aid” programs were promoted and suicide hotlines were set up to counter the macho-culture notion that emotional problems were signs of weakness. Unfortunately, 74 percent of last year’s suicides made no mention of their thoughts of self-harm before making the irrevocable mistake.
One byproduct of the intervention initiative appears to be the eightfold increase in prescriptions for psychotropic drugs in the military since 2005. At present, it is estimated that 110,000 active-duty personnel regularly take these medications. Eight percent of the Army is being treated with sedatives or anti-anxiety narcotics; 6 percent take anti-depressives and 1 in 4 has been prescribed an opiate painkiller. Perhaps not coincidentally, the military suicide rate began to rise even more precipitously in 2006.
Dr. Peter R. Breggin, M.D., reports on the findings of the FDA that “…antidepressants, all of them, cause increased suicidality in young adults. Suicide occurs more than twice as much on antidepressants than on sugar pills in individuals under age 25.” Remember that the typical military suicide was a white male under 25.
Of course, correlation does not prove causation. This is especially clear in the present instance where the correlation is nowhere near one-to-one. Suicide was already a significant concern in the military before the noted increase in psychotropic prescriptions and — thankfully — mortality has since risen at nowhere near an 800 percent rate.
But a growing body of research suggests that a possible link between psychotropic drug use and suicide merits serious study. Jason Boardman, a PhD sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Connor Sheehan, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, recently collaborated to study the toxicology results of 5,791 autopsy reports from violent deaths that occurred in Colorado from 2004-09.
Of these victims, 77 percent were male; 83 percent were suicides. Among other findings, the researchers concluded, “Opiates and antidepressants are associated strongly with suicide…”
Obviously, a chicken-and-egg conundrum is involved here. People who are in pain — physical or psychological — are the most likely candidates to seek remedies for these discomforts. Their underlying problem could be the cause of the self-destructive behavior, not the drug intended to ameliorate their suffering.
However, it may be that our military merely reflects the society it seeks to defend. By 2005, antidepressants had become the most prescribed drugs in the United States. Today, Americans comprise fewer than 5 percent of the world’s population but consume 80 percent of the world’s prescription opioids and 99 percent of its hydrocodone, the active narcotic in Vicodin.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry fields 1,274 registered agents in D.C., easily making it the largest lobbying concern in the nation’s capital. And as anyone who’s watched the evening news in the last decade can attest, drug manufacturers are not bashful about advertising their wares.
Has our conditioned belief in “better living through chemistry” turned the base pharmacy into a soldiers’ most deadly enemy? I don’t know but it’s a question worth asking.