Casey Says Army Suicide Rate Slowing

Six months after the Army reported 2009 as its worst year ever for suicides, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. says the service may be at a turning point.

"As I've looked at the suicide rates for the end of [2010], it appears we have slowed the rate of active-duty suicides since 2004," Casey said at a breakfast meeting organized by the Association of the U.S. Army today in Arlington, Va. "That's certainly not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but with all the huge effort we've been putting into this we're starting to see a slowing in the rate of suicides among Soldiers on active duty, and that's a good thing."

Suicide rates in the Army have climbed each year since 2004.

The Army has not released the final numbers, but it said it had 144 confirmed suicides through November of 2010. (Army officials said they had no confirmed suicides for November but were investigating 11 deaths as potential suicides. The service is also investigating seven October deaths as potential suicides.)  The total number of suicides for 2009 was 162 – so even if all 18 deaths still under investigation for last year turn out to be suicides, the annual total would not exceed 2009's total, Army officials note.

Casey's hopeful conclusion comes even as the Army reports that Fort Hood had 22 suicides in 2010, twice the number it had the year before. At the same time Fort Campbell, Ky., reported 12 suicides through November 2010. Last year the post reported 21 suicides.

Overall, 26 of the 144 suicides between January and November 2010 occurred in theater. That figure represents less than 20 percent of the deaths and is roughly the same percentage as all of 2009, when 30 of the 162 confirmed suicides occurred in theater. As a percentage of the annual totals, in-theater suicides have been declining since the middle of the decade.

One of the great stresses on the force has been the frequency of deployments, and some experts contend this has contributed to the high suicide rate. Casey predicted that by October the Army would be able to return to its pre-9/11 rotations of two years at home following a year-long deployment. For reserve component Soldiers, the so-called "dwell time" would be three years following a year deployment.