Army and Agency Will Study Rising Suicide Rate Among Soldiers

[groovedaddy]

Conceding it needed outside help in figuring out why the suicide rate among service members was rising, the Army announced plans on Wednesday to collaborate with the National Institute of Mental Health in an ambitious five-year project to identify the causes and risk factors of suicide.

The Army will make thousands of soldiers available to researchers for interviews and will provide access to its many databases, including those with medical, personnel, criminal and deployment histories. Researchers will draw from a cross section of the Army and will include soldiers who have just joined the service or are training for war and those who have returned from war.

Rather than wait until the study is completed, the National Institute of Mental Health will provide the Army with new information as researchers find it in the hopes of preventing soldier suicides.

Peter Geren, the secretary of the Army, described the five-year, $50 million study as a “landmark undertaking” modeled after the Framingham Heart Study. That influential study looked at heart health over a long period of time among a large group of participants who had not yet developed symptoms or suffered a heart attack.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/us/30soldiers.html?th&emc=th

[Crowman1979]

1. Well first off, the causes and risk factors of suide have already been identified.

And it all goes back to the Iraq war. End it and the suicide rate will drop.