{"id":2690,"date":"2007-11-15T12:13:29","date_gmt":"2007-11-15T17:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=2690"},"modified":"2007-11-15T12:13:29","modified_gmt":"2007-11-15T17:13:29","slug":"120-us-war-veteran-suicides-a-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=2690","title":{"rendered":"120 US war veteran suicides a week"},"content":{"rendered":"

From correspondents in New York<\/strong>
\nNovember 15, 2007 09:47am<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

THE US military is experiencing a “suicide epidemic” with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an investigation by US television network CBS.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At least 6256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005 – an average of 17 a day – the network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.<\/p>\n

While the suicide rate among the general population was 8.9 per 100,000, the level among veterans was between 18.7 and 20.8 per 100,000.<\/p>\n

That figure rose to 22.9 to 31.9 suicides per 100,000 among veterans aged 20 to 24 – almost four times the non-veteran average for the age group.<\/p>\n

“Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems,” CBS quoted veterans’ rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.<\/p>\n

CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem to be known.<\/p>\n

“Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,” Mike Bowman said.<\/p>\n

“They don’t want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There are 25 million veterans in the United States, 1.6 million of whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to CBS.<\/p>\n

“Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is nobody comes home unchanged,” Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America said on CBS.<\/p>\n

The network said it was the first time that a nationwide count of veteran suicides had been conducted.<\/p>\n

The tally was reached by collating suicide data from individual states for both veterans and the general population from 1995.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From correspondents in New York November 15, 2007 09:47am THE US military is experiencing a “suicide epidemic” with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an investigation by US television network CBS. At least 6256 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-Ho","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}