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Concern Grows That High Military Suicide Rates Are ‘New Normal’

Military Times reports that “seven years after the rate of suicides by soldiers more than doubled, the Army has failed to reduce the tragic pace of self-destruction, and experts worry the problem is a ‘new normal.'”  

“‘It’s very clear that nothing that the Army has done has resulted in the suicide rates coming down,’ said Carl Castro, a psychologist who retired from the Army in 2013, when he was a colonel overseeing behavioral health research programs.”  

“The sharp rise in the Army’s suicide rate from 2004 through 2009 coincided with unusually heavy demands on the nation’s all-volunteer military, as hundreds of thousands of troops, most of them in the Army, deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The vast majority have since come home, but suicide rates remain stubbornly high.”

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