30,177 Military Members Have Died by Suicide since 9/11. Why? – By Kat McAlpine-Boston (Futurity) / Sept 15 2021
This article was originally published in Futurity. Edits have been made to this republication. It has been republished under the Attribution 4.0 International license.
In the past 20 years, 30,177 active military and veterans of post-9/11 wars have committed suicide. That’s four times as many deaths as those killed in action.
In the 20 years since the September 11 terror attacks, four times as many deaths among members of the military have been caused by suicide compared to those killed in action.
That’s 30,177 active duty personnel and veterans of the post-9/11 wars who have taken their own lives.
While these high suicide rates can partially be attributed to the mental health toll of participating in war—exposure to trauma, stress, access to guns, difficulty returning to civilian life after duty—there are additional factors, one of the biggest being traumatic brain injury, unique to the wars stemming from 9/11, that contribute to the rising suicide rates among military members, says Thomas “Ben” Suitt, who earlier this year earned a PhD from Boston University’s graduate program in religion, specializing in the sociology of religion in the military and social ethics.
“Among the demographic of veterans aged 18 to 34, who most likely served in post-9/11 conflicts, the suicide rate per 100,000 was 25.5 in 2005. Today, that rate is 45.9 per 100,000,” Suitt says.
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