What to Know About Suicides in the U.S. Army

Soldiers are more likely than their civilian peers to die by suicide. Many people wrongly believe this is because of combat trauma, but in fact the most vulnerable group are soldiers who have never deployed. The Army’s suicide rate has risen steadily even in peacetime, and the numbers now exceed total combat deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A Times investigation into the death of Specialist Austin Valley, stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas, found that mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.

Here’s what you need to know about the Army’s suicide crisis:

The size and psychological strength of the Army has declined.

After the Vietnam War, the Army went through a period of recalibration, a slowing-down that allowed leaders to take stock of their troops and assess their strategies. That hasn’t happened since the military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021. For some units, in fact, the “operational tempo,” or amount of time soldiers spend away from home, is as high as it was during the peak of the war on terror, though the size of the force is smaller: The Army lowered its recruiting target in 2023, after falling thousands of people short of their goal in recent years.

The Army’s strategy is to deter nuclear rivals like China or Russia by placing troops all over the world on peacetime missions. This requires that the Army be able to deploy anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Maintaining constant “readiness” often comes at the cost of the health and well-being of soldiers, who describe feeling purposeless as they are worked as hard or harder than ever with no clear goal. “Everyone in the Army is depressed,”one soldier says.

The Army’s mental-health care system is broken.

Soldiers struggling with their mental health are sent to the Army’s Behavioral Health department, referred to colloquially as B.H., which experts and providers call severely dysfunctional and understaffed. At Fort Riley, for example, there are only about 20 mental-health counselors tasked with caring for more than 12,000 soldiers. As a result, soldiers seeking help can wait weeks or months to get an appointment. Providers can keep spotty medical records and fail to thoroughly assess patients before prescribing medications, including antidepressants that carry black-box warnings that they might worsen suicidality in some young people.

Army leaders routinely undermine privacy and safety protocols.

Though the Army says it is trying to remove the stigma around mental-health care, it can be careless with patient confidentiality. Some unit leaders publicly display a list of their soldiers’ mental-health appointments or openly discuss their health statuses. They can also put pressure on providers to make decisions that go against the best interests of their patients.