The Department of Defense hopes an “unprecedented investment” of about $250 million in the fiscal year 2025 budget will help boost suicide prevention efforts as the number of Active-duty military suicide deaths continues to rise over the past 12 years.
The total number and rate of Airmen who died by suicide jumped in 2022 compared to 2021, though both figures are still below the high rates the service saw in the years prior, according to the Defense Department’s annual Report on Suicide in the Military ...
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III announced new steps in a multiyear plan to improve mental health and suicide prevention in the military on March 16—issuing a memo outlining 10 steps the Pentagon will take at the recommendation of an independent review committee. However, ...
While the Defense Department is looking to expand opportunities for service members to seek professional help for mental health issues, the DOD is still struggling with institutional policies and norms that wind up hurting those who do get help and discouraging others, lawmakers and advocates ...
Five hundred and eighty service members died by suicide in 2020, the Pentagon announced Sept. 30, when the Defense Department released its annual suicide report. Those 580 deaths mark the most the DOD has recorded in at least five years, with the Active-duty component accounting ...
The number of U.S. military service members and veterans who have killed themselves since Sept. 11, 2001, is more than four times the number of service members who have been killed in war operations, according to a report released June 21. Data compiled by the ...
The Department of the Air Force has released its first-ever video-based suicide prevention training for USAF and Space Force families. The online course, entitled “Equipping Family Members to Help Airmen in Distress,” educates viewers on different ways they can intervene and how to access resources ...
As the Defense Department prepares to release its Annual Suicide Report in the coming weeks, Air Force Magazine details the impact suicide has had on the Total Force so far in 2020, and how the service’s top uniformed leaders and its reserve component are working ...
Josh Jabin, a Marine Corps veteran and the chief operating officer at the Travis Manion Foundation, hopes the group's employment of positive psychology to promote mental health among veterans and the families of fallen service members can help inspire its broader use to fight suicide—and ...
Service members will be able to anonymously seek mental health treatment, without their chain of command being notified, under new proposed legislation. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) introduced the “Brandon Act,” which aims to protect service members from hazing, bullying, and any other issue if they ...
The House Armed Services military personnel subcommittee wants to require the Defense Department to include more detail in its annual military suicide reports to Congress, including what steps military departments are taking to make it feel less controversial for troops to ask for help if ...
A total of 137 Airmen took their own lives in 2019—a 33 percent increase from the 103 suicides in 2018 despite service efforts to get the problem under control. The high pace of suicides has long worried senior service leaders, who in July ordered wings ...