Harnessing community to counter military suicide

The Defense Department’s latest quarterly suicide report revealed that suicides increased among active-duty service members and reservists over the course of 2020, with a 25% increase in reservist suicides during the fourth quarter of 2020 compared with the same period in 2019.

Some military leaders have attributed the increase to coronavirus “stress.” Pentagon spokesman Army Maj. Cesar Santiago emphasized that only a suicide rate, which has yet to be calculated, will “determine whether a true increase or decrease in suicides occurred across a given population.”