Soldiers are more likely than their civilian peers to die by suicide. Many people wrongly believe this is because of combat trauma, but in fact the most vulnerable group are soldiers who have never deployed. The Army’s suicide rate has risen steadily even in peacetime, and the numbers now exceed total combat deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A Times investigation into the death of Specialist Austin Valley, stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas, found that mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.
Here’s what you need to know about the Army’s suicide crisis:
The size and psychological strength of the Army has declined.
After the Vietnam War, the Army went through a period of recalibration, a slowing-down that allowed leaders to take stock of their troops and assess their strategies. That hasn’t happened since the military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021. For some units, in fact, the “operational tempo,” or amount of time soldiers spend away from home, is as high as it was during the peak of the war on terror, though the size of the force is smaller: The Army lowered its recruiting target in 2023, after falling thousands of people short of their goal in recent years.
The Army’s strategy is to deter nuclear rivals like China or Russia by placing troops all over the world on peacetime missions. This requires that the Army be able to deploy anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Maintaining constant “readiness” often comes at the cost of the health and well-being of soldiers, who describe feeling purposeless as they are worked as hard or harder than ever with no clear goal. “Everyone in the Army is depressed,” one soldier says.
The Army’s mental-health care system is broken.
Soldiers struggling with their mental health are sent to the Army’s Behavioral Health department, referred to colloquially as B.H., which experts and providers call severely dysfunctional and understaffed. At Fort Riley, for example, there are only about 20 mental-health counselors tasked with caring for more than 12,000 soldiers. As a result, soldiers seeking help can wait weeks or months to get an appointment. Providers can keep spotty medical records and fail to thoroughly assess patients before prescribing medications, including antidepressants that carry black-box warnings that they might worsen suicidality in some young people.
Army leaders routinely undermine privacy and safety protocols.
Though the Army says it is trying to remove the stigma around mental-health care, it can be careless with patient confidentiality. Some unit leaders publicly display a list of their soldiers’ mental-health appointments or openly discuss their health statuses. They can also put pressure on providers to make decisions that go against the best interests of their patients.
In recent years, to exert more control over soldier care, Army leaders have integrated mental-health providers directly into their units, writing their annual evaluations and determining their promotions. Providers say they can feel pressured to change a course of treatment or allow soldiers to deploy overseas to help the Army make its personnel quotas. “You have to make a choice,” one B.H. officer says. “Your career or the lives of your soldiers.”
Easy access to guns is an ongoing problem.
Firearms are used in a majority of suicides among active duty troops. Unrestrictive gun laws in the United States make it harder for the Army to protect soldiers who have reported suicidal ideation. Federal law bars people who have been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward or institution from buying a gun, but not those who have sought help voluntarily. Even if the Army marks soldiers as “high risk” and prohibits them from handling military-issued weapons, the policy cannot apply to personally owned firearms and has no power outside the base.
The Army fails to take the advice of its own experts.
The Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars on suicide-prevention research over the past two decades, but the findings of those studies are routinely ignored. In February 2023, the most recent of the department’s independent suicide-prevention committees released a report that cited high operational tempo, lax rules around guns and poor quality of life on bases as major problems. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of an institute that studies military suicides at the University of Memphis, says that the committee’s report echoes many others that have been produced since 2008; he has no confidence that this time, the recommendations will be taken seriously. “My expectation is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented,” he says.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.