Essay On Military Veterans Suicide

United States military veterans make up a sizeable population that has been identified as being at increased risk for suicide. There were 7.8 million veterans enrolled in Veteran Health Administration (VHA) healthcare in 2007, representing 33% of the veteran population (Kaplan, McFarland, & Huguet, 2009). Of those 7.8 million veterans, approximately five million are provided health services from the VHA each year. This is roughly one-fifth of all veterans living in the United States. In March 2010, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) released a sobering statistic that every eighty minutes a military veteran commits suicide (McCarl, 2013). Today, this statistic has increased to one veteran every sixty-six seconds; 22 veterans a day commit suicide (McCarl, 2013). The growing suicide rates among Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF)/ Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) military personnel and veterans has become a tremendous public health concern, which is prompted by recent studies documenting an elevated prevalence of suicide risk factors among these individuals (Blow, Bohnert, Ilgen, Ignacio, McCarthy, Valenstein, & Knox, 2012). Despite the implementation of VA programs that help with the psychological issues faced by military veterans have increased significantly since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (McCarl, 2013). In
Compared to the general population, suicide rates among VHA patients were significantly higher. According to the VA office of the Inspector General, as many, if not more than, 5000 of all veterans die every year (Kaplan, McFarland, Huguet, and Valenstein, 2012). For the U.S. Army, this has been of great concern considering their rate of completed suicides has markedly increased since 2006 (Hyman, Ireland, Frost, & Cottrell, 2012). According to Kaplan et al. (2009), it is believed that the suicide rate may be 10% to 50% higher than what has been officially