Suicide takes more military lives than combat, especially among women
image from article, with caption: Deana Martorella Orellana stands before the Memorial Honor Wall in Charleroi, Pa., where her grandfather's name is engraved. She killed herself in 2016, joining him on the wall. (Martorella family)
Perspective by Petula Dvorak. Columnist, The Washington Post, May 30, 2022 at 12:30 p.m. EDT
Excerpt:
Suicide has been the main killer of U.S. personnel since the Sept. 11 attacks. More than 30,000 of them have died by their own hands since, during a period that saw about 7,000 service members die in combat or training exercises, according to a project from Brown University.
Suicide in the military community is at its highest rate since 1938, according to a Department of Defense report released last month.
Increasingly, those killed are women.
In 2020, they accounted for 7 percent of military suicides — up from 4 percent a decade earlier, according to Department of Defense numbers. About 1 in 6 servicemembers is female.
The reports break down the deaths by gender, age and branch, but they hardly address the dramatic increase among women. ...
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