It's a very good question, and it's something I've revisited on a number of occasions with the military.
First off, should we be concerned? Absolutely. A suicide death is a preventable death. If there are adequate resources available and they're accessible without stigma, and they're also experienced and competent, then a lot of these suicides could be prevented.
The military should have a much lower rate of suicide than the normal population. We don't have the very elderly. We don't have the people with cancers, the very ill, the alcoholics, the drug addicts. There's a whole host of people who typically have high suicide rates, and in the military we don't have that. We've done screening out, we've been looking for people who can handle stress. For the most part I feel that our troops are well trained.
We have to have a look at what is actually causing these things. Is it the deployments? Is it the tempo? Sometimes the stressor is not necessarily the deployment. It may be the stress that is affecting the family and is then transferred back to the individual. Again, we need to be looking at more than just the individual. We need to be looking at the family as a whole and the support system in that regard.
I think, compared to where we were.... I keep saying “we”. I'm out of the military, but you can't get the military out of me. I think we've come a long way in regard to mental health. I think we can go further.
Again, I think the regular force members have much better support than they used to, but my big concern right now is with the reservists. These people come back and they may leave their unit. They become civilians, and then they're lost for follow-up and they're lost in the statistics.
How many times have you read about a young individual who crashes their vehicle or motorcycle at high speed? That's never classified as a suicide, yet I can tell you right now, a significant number of the individuals I see, military and ex-military, engage in very high-risk behaviour, and they do not care if they die or not.
So the reservist issue is a huge one that I think we need to address much more than we have to date.