"Suicide at the unprecedented rate of more than 20 each day—*one every 65 minutes,* reported Daily News of New York City"
Dr. Joseph Rothberg was the pre-eminent Army researcher of suicides
and father of the military’s analysis of completed suicides. He died
this past January, as noted here,
and I attended his memorial service on Florida’s Anna Maria Island in
February. I wanted to share some reflections about his legacy.
Although psychological autopsies were first described in the 1950s,
they seemed to be rare and uneven. The first description of how to do a
psychological autopsy was described in an Army pamphlet in 1988, here.
Psychological autopsies then were supposed to be done on all Army
suicides. They were long narratives, painstakingly typed on 20 to 30
pages. Good information, which initially too often ended up in a desk
drawer.
Read more: http://nation.time.com/2013/03/15/army-suicides-and-the-legacy-of-dr-joseph-rothberg/#ixzz2OlNwP0OP
Military Suicides Hit Epidemic Levels
March 27, 2013
AFP, By Pat Shannan
• Unimaginable stress, irrepressible memories, psychoactive prescription drugs make lethal combination
With what must be one of the strangest statistics in the history of wartime, the Pentagon has released the fact that more soldiers are dying overseas by committing suicide than from combat wounds —about one a day. July 2012 was the worst on record, a month that saw 38 soldiers take their own lives and with 349 recorded for the year. These figures have doubled in the past decade.
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