Report urges new office for suicide prevention - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Report urges new office for suicide prevention

The Defense Department should investigate military suicides more thoroughly and create a new top-level Pentagon office for suicide prevention, according to a new report from a congressional task force.

The military should “pattern suicide investigations on aviation accident investigations, and use the safety investigation process as a model to standardize suicide investigations,” said Bonnie Carroll, co-chair for the task force Congress created last year to examine the spike in military suicides.

The task force’s 14 members — seven military members and seven civilians — spent a year visiting installations and studying military suicides and the efforts in place to prevent them.

Their report, released Tuesday, includes 76 specific recommendations that include increasing troops’ dwell time, adding full-time suicide prevention coordinators and putting suicide prevention elements into broader military education programs.

A new office under the Office of the Secretary of Defense should help coordinate the tracking of suicides and the standardization of suicide prevention efforts, the report said.

Current efforts to investigate suicides are not standardized, so the task force was unable to identify particular groups of service members who may be at the highest risk for suicide.

“We don’t have enough data to answer that,” said Army Maj. Gen. Philip Volpe, the head of the Army’s Western Regional Medical Command and the task force’s co-chair.

Many troops feel the current suicide prevention efforts provide little practical help, said Carroll, who is also the national director for the Tragedy Assistance Programs for Survivors, or TAPS.

“During our site visits, we repeatedly heard from service members who told us that they almost died from boredom listening to yet another suicide prevention briefing. They felt this was done more to fill a requirement than to give them the tools they need,” Carroll said.

Ultimately, stress on the force and the repeated deployments for many troops is a critical factor in the rise in military suicides, Volpe said.

“There are things that internally can be done within the Department of Defense and we also believe that he strategic leaders of the nation need to look at the supply and demand on the force — and balance that out,” Volpe said. “Clearly, there is a supply demand mismatch in the way the current force is operating and that is creating some stress on the force.”