Military suicides merit deeper look
Statistically insignificant.
That’s a chilling term to describe fluctuation of suicide rates in the Canadian military. But in the context of a newly released Surgeon General report that studied suicides among service personnel between 1995 and 2014, it’s also the crucial finding.
You might not have realized that key takeaway from the exhaustive document released Tuesday, unless reading deep into the stories that were subsequently published.
For example, this: Male suicides in the deployed Armed Forces — because female suicides are too small in number to quantify for statistical analysis — in the two five-year periods prior to 2005 were 73 per cent of what would be expected, based on Canadian male suicide rates in the general population. That means “male personnel who were deployed were 27 per cent less likely to die of suicide compared to the Canadian population of males of the same age.’’
From 2005 to 2009, deployed men in the regular forces (as opposed to reservists, because those figures are incomplete) were 10 per cent less likely to die of suicide than Canadian males of the same age. “(T)his result was not statistically significant.’’
While the suicide numbers were “substantially’’ higher in 2010-11 compared with previous years (17 suicides among the deployed, 16 among the non-deployed), the report says, “it is unclear whether this non-statistically significant elevation in suicide risk … is due to an emerging trend or simply to random variation in the number of events from year to year . . .’’
From 1995 to 1999, the suicide rate was 1 per cent; from 2000 to 2004, 1.02 per cent; from 2005 to 2009, 1.37 per cent; from 2010 to 2014, 1.56 per cent. Statistically insignificant. One way to look at the stats: A Canadian male is less likely to com- mit suicide if he joins the Armed Forces.
The numbers within the numbers certainly bear further examination and should — will, it’s been promised — have an impact on psychological profiling and counselling services provided. The services, by the way, are more easily accessed within the military than on civvy street, although there may be pressures exerted — the soldier culture — preventing individuals from admitting mental problems such as depression and seeking treatment.
There certainly are some worrisome trends, only now coming to statistical light.
Deployed military personnel have a higher suicide rate than those who never leave Canada, although the finding “fell just short of statistical significance.”
Soldiers — by definition those in army regiments — experienced a suicide rate twice as high as Navy and Air Force members. But of course soldiers, with their on-theground presence, would have been far closer to the psychic ravages of war in Afghanistan and Bosnia than sailors and pilots. For the latter, however integral their contribution, war was a distant thing.
Higher rates were particularly apparent among men in the “combat arms trades,” with suicide rates of 30 per 100,000, versus 18 per 100,000 among those in non-combat trades.
It should be emphasized here that the vast majority of 40,000 Armed Forces personnel deployed to Afghanistan during Canada’s 11-year military contribution to the NATOled mission never stepped foot outside the wire at Kandahar.
Full combat operations didn’t actually begin until 2006, with the deployment (at its height) of 3,000 troops at one time to KAF. During every deployment, only about onethird of those troops — infantry and artillery regiments — were involved in combat operations.
Inside the wire, sprawling KAF, with its boardwalk shops and takeout restaurants, its ball hockey rink and round-the-clock mess halls, its Canada House and pool tables and movie nights and barbecues and showers and air conditioning and occasional beer allowance, was a pretty cushy place to be, as far as these things go.
The hard-humping — living on rations, sleeping on the desert floor, conducting foot patrols while schlepping 50 pounds of gear, and always at risk of IED attacks — fell entirely to those combat units (and, to some extent, re-provisioning details).
Of the 158 deaths Canada suffered in Afghanistan (which included consultants, a diplomat and one journalist), 132 resulted from enemy action: 97 in explosions (primarily IEDs), 22 in direct fire and 13 from suicide attacks.
I do not at all mean to minimize what Canadian troops brought to the fight in Afghanistan and the mission’s toll.
But, apart from those rare occasions when the Taliban stood and fought in conventional combat — most notably battalion-strength Operation Medusa, the second Battle of Panjwaii in 2006 — there was not much protracted and gutchurning action akin to, say, the two Battles of Fallujah that American troops endured in Iraq.
It was war, all right, but not as most people might envision it from the movies. A lot of it, even in the isolated and primitive living conditions of forward operating bases, was marked by stupefying boredom, day-to-day.
I can speak only anecdotally, from nine tours of reporting duty in Afghanistan — sometimes embedded, sometimes not. But I never encountered a combat soldier who seemed mentally unfit for the job or psychologically frail. If anything, front-line troops are made of far stronger stuff than the average Canadian male, especially combat units, with their rigorous qualifications.
That’s why this Surgeon General report — more specifically, how it’s being massaged — is so deeply troubling to me.
Over the decade scrutinized, 225 regular-force servicemen took their lives and 13 regular-force servicewomen committed suicide, which is in line with the civilian population over that period. From 2010 to 2014, the uptick was statistically insignificant: 68 compared with 51.
Every suicide is tragic, whether among military personnel or civilians; that should go without saying. But while one’s basic instincts would suggest that soldiers who commit suicide must have been affected to some degree by what they witnessed, what they did, they’re also subject to the same “multivariable’’ stressors — collapsing marriages, financial worries, alcoholism, mood disorders, the whole gamut of human existence — as anybody else.
Indeed, the report’s authors draw no firm empirical conclusions about cause and effect, beyond observing that the Afghanistan mission had a “powerful impact on the mental health of an important minority of personnel who deployed in support of it.’’
It’s imperative that we document, sift and analyze the record — the human cost of the Afghan mission.
Just don’t fetishize those deaths, the suicides and the trauma, by jumping to unfounded conclusions and wringing your hands over the lot of the soldier.
The rest of us should only be half as tough, half as mentally sturdy, as a Canadian combat soldier. Most of us could not fill his boots. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.