Fellowship will explore the topic of military suicides

Howard Altman Columns

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One of the best things about being a reporter is that pretty much every day, I am paid to learn something new.

And to get to know whatever I am learning well enough to explain it to tens of thousands of strangers each time I file a story.

But even when I cover a topic frequently, there is always more to be learned.

Especially on a topic as sensitive as suicide, which is why I am looking forward going to Dallas for a Poynter Institute fellowship called “Covering Suicide and Mental Health: A McCormick Specialized Reporting Institute.”

Because I cover the military, suicide is an issue I write about all too often. It involves talking to grieving loved ones, friends, colleagues and commanders who are struggling to cope not just with the death, but with the question of why?

It is a question that often has no answer. Or several answers.

But the question of why I cover suicide, which may seem intrusive to those left behind, is far simpler to answer.

In 2012, the Department of Veterans Affairs released an oft-quoted study showing that 22 veterans a day take their own lives. It’s a problem, as I have written, that’s vexing both the military and the VA, which are struggling to find ways to prevent suicides.

According to a study published February in the medical journal Annals of Epidemiology, the nearly 1.3 million veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2007 had a 41 percent to 61 percent higher risk of suicide than the general population, with 1,868 committing suicide during that time period. And while female veterans were far less likely than men to commit suicide, when compared to those who never served, female veterans were more likely to commit suicide than male veterans.

For the media, when it comes to covering suicide, there is a different threshold of news than other homicides (a word that means the taking of a life). That’s because of what mental health experts call “suicide contagion” — causing those with suicidal tendencies to take action.

But when it comes to suicides of veterans and active duty personnel, reservists and guard members, the threshold is pretty much universally met because the stories are not just about individual action, but about looking for why and how the individual action fits into the much larger matrix of the problem.

My most recent story about a military suicide was largely about the search for why, a quest that in the case of Air Force Reserve Capt. Jamie Brunette may forever be unfulfilled.

Shared 50,000 times on Facebook, nearly 600 times on Twitter and more than 40 times on Google+, it was, for a variety of reasons, the story that had the most social media resonance of anything I’ve written.

I think I did the story justice but there is always more that can be done, better ways to approach things and more telling contexts in which to present the stories. (Even as I write this, I am talking with two people who each lost a loved one to suicide and are struggling with the why, which in some cases involves mental health issues, another major topic of the fellowship.)

Among other things, during the 2 1/2 days in Dallas, we’ll discuss how to access and analyze important statistics, how to examine governmental systems and obligations, trends, and how to avoid the spread of suicide contagion.

I’ll let you know what I learn.

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U.S. Special Operations Command, with personnel deployed in as many as 80 nations at any given time, and at a rapid and grueling pace, has been struggling for years with suicides among its ranks.

Between 2008 and last year, 99 commandos committed suicide, according to Socom spokesman Ken McGraw. The figures spiked between 2011 and 2012, when the number of suicides jumped from 10 to 23. They’ve fallen since, with 21 in 2013 and 18 last year.

Those figures mirror the overall direction and ratio of suicide figures for the entire military, according to the Pentagon’s Quarterly Suicide Report.

To help cope with what former Socom commander William McRaven called “the fraying of the force,” the command has developed its own program called Preservation of the Force and Family to help take care of the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of its troops. And the command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, is renewing its efforts to figure out how to stem the suicide problem.

Last week, Socom announced its intention of entering into another contract with the American Association of Suicidology to provide support and training in a number of areas, including recognizing and responding to suicide risk and developing and implementing training for military healthcare professionals to conduct “psychological autopsies.”

A psychological autopsy, according to the association of suicidology, “helps promote understandings to the often-asked ‘why?’ question raised by survivors regarding the suicide of their loved one.”

It is in wide use throughout the military, according to Matthew R. Allen, a Pentagon spokesman.

“The Department of Defense has strived to be on the forefront of research, methods and practices that will help us to analyze, understand and prevent suicide,” he said. “The use of training and techniques for psychological autopsies is one of several tools that DoD and the various services use to enhance the understanding of military deaths by suicide.”

I’ll drill deeper into the issue of psychological autopsies while I’m in Dallas.

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The Pentagon announced no U.S. troop or Department of Defense civilian deaths last week in support of ongoing operations.

There have been seven U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and two U.S. troop deaths and one civilian Department of Defense employee death in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.