The America’s Warrior Partnership believes the number of veterans ‘ suicides is higher than the statistics reported by the Department of Veterans Affairs
.
Its report, Operation Deep Dive
, used state-provided death data and military records from eight states to evaluate the suicide rate and find trends to try to end veteran suicides altogether.
The group uncovered that the suicide rate among veterans from 2014 to 2018 was 37% higher than reported by the VA and that if the rate from the eight states they investigated was adjusted to represent a national rate, there were be an average of 24 veteran suicides daily, instead of the 2014-2018 average of 18 veteran suicides.
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A spokesperson for the Department of Veterans Affairs told the Washington Examiner that its Annual Suicide Prevent Report is “based on verified data from the CDC and DoD, and meets the quality and standards of a peer-reviewed publication.”
“The purpose of VA’s National Suicide Prevention report is to count every Veteran suicide so we can prevent every Veteran suicide. Ending Veteran suicide and saving lives is our top clinical priority at VA, and we take every step possible to make sure that our Veteran suicide data is accurate — because the first step to solving this problem is understanding it,” the spokesperson said. “Our methodology for creating this report is well-established and consistent.”
Former service members from the Air Force were the least likely to die from suicide, followed by the Navy
, Army
, Marines
, and lastly, the Coast Guard
.
Another one of the group’s findings was that not every current or former service member who died by suicide was identified as a member of the military. Eighteen percent of the time, a service member who takes his or her own life isn’t recognized at the time of death as having served in the military.
“One of our recommendations is that the federal government create a tool for county officials to use to validate someone’s service so that it can be annotated correctly from the beginning. And the reason why this is important is because the way the VA does their accounting and veteran suicide,” Jim Lorraine, the president of America’s Warrior Partnership and an Air Force veteran, told the Washington Examiner.
Lorraine also said that for Operation Deep Dive, the next step is to increase the number of states the group gathers data from, jumping from eight to 20, and that the organization hopes to work with the VA on suicide prevention.
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The service members Operation Deep Dive focused on were those between the ages of 18 and 64, and the information was collected from Alabama, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, and Oregon.
“The bottom line is this: One Veteran suicide is one too many, and VA will continue to accurately measure Veteran suicide so we can end Veteran suicide,” the VA spokesperson said.
