Analysis of Suicide Behaviors in the Navy Population

Abstract

U.S. military suicides have increased significantly over the past decade and currently account for almost 20% of all military deaths. Effective suicide prevention efforts require better information to identify high-risk segments of the population. In this research project, we investigated the associations of suicides and suicide attempts among current and former service members with a comprehensive set of time-varying risk factors including: deployment, diagnoses of major mental disorders, history of unlawful activity, stressful life events, and other demographic and service factor. Importantly, we observe suicide death (although not suicide attempts) of veterans after separating from the military. We estimate all of our analyses for all-service population and Navy-only population.