Suicide And Its Impact On The United States - 1556 Words

Suicide has historically been and continues to be a significant issue in the United States, for civilians as well as active duty military service members and veterans. While statistics surrounding suicide appear to be just numbers on a page, I personally implore the reader of the following paper to never lose sight of the fact that those numbers represent real people. Each one of those people, be they civilian or military, represent a loss of a father or a mother, a brother or a sister, a son or a daughter, a best friend, a comrade, †¦a person whose life, and that life’s potential, is now forever lost. The following statistics on suicide rates in the United States do not differentiate if the individual was a civilian, an active duty†¦show more content†¦As in 1964, nearly 50 percent (49.92 percent) of those who committed suicide in 2014, did so using a firearm (Wintemute, 2015). Buried amongst the preceding numbers are the suicide statistics related directly to active duty service members and the veterans, which now will be exposed, calculated, and compared to those of the civilian population. In a report prepared by the CDC, the suicide rate among the general population in 2013 was 12.6 per 100,000. In comparison, data compiled by the Department of Defense (DoD) on active duty personnel in the U.S. armed services, indicated a suicide rate of 18.7 per 100,000 that same year. This equates to the suicide rate, in 2013, among active duty service members (18.7 per 100,000) being 48 percent higher than the suicide rate of the general population (12.6 per 100,000) (Meyer, 2015). According to the Department of Veterans Affairs Mental Health Services Suicide Prevention Program (2012), 49,000 veterans committed suicide between 2005-2011. Furthermore, when a state by state comparison of veterans and civilian suicide rates are calculated and compared, â€Å"Veterans commit suicide at double and sometimes triple the rates of civilian suicides, with the rates varying from state to state,† the overall statistics equate to an average of 30 per 100,000. Roughly, one in every five (20%) suicides in the United States is a veteran (Hargarten, Burnson, Campo,