The First Year Home May Be Most Dangerous For Vets’ Mental Health

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/veterans-may-face-higher-risk-of-suicide-during-first-year-home_us_58136e66e4b0390e69cfab9f?platform=hootsuite

RP Members and Connections according to a new study, veterans were more likely to die by suicide during the first year after they left the military than later on.

“Stigma remains pervasive in society and many veterans still do not seek help when needed.”

Veterans may be more likely to commit suicide during the first year after they leave the military than after more time passes, a U.S. study suggests.

Compared with people still on active duty in the military, veterans out of the service for up to three months were 2.5 times more likely to commit suicide, the study found. Veterans who had left the service from three to 12 months earlier had almost triple the suicide odds of current members of the military.

“Family members and community can be proactive to reach out to veterans if they recently experienced stressful events – not just limited to the stressful events we can capture in the data such as divorce or separation from the military,” said lead study author Yu-Chu Shen, a researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

“In addition, clinicians should be aware that deployments may increase suicide risk independently of underlying mental disorders, and so asking patients about deployment history is advisable,” Shen said by email.

To assess how different types of experiences during military service and afterwards might influence suicide risk, researchers analyzed data collected on almost 3.8 million current and former service members from 2001 to 2011.

Overall, there were 4,492 suicides in the study population.

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