When she was a commander at a National Guard unit in New York, Maj. Gen. Dawne Deskins grew concerned when a National Guardsman did not appear for work. A wellness check was immediately ordered.
The guardsman was found having attempted suicide but was saved.
The event shook the entire unit, making leadership and fellow guard members feel a sense of responsibility, Deskins told journalists at a press briefing Thursday to discuss the progress of suicide prevention programs in the Guard, where a suicide rate of 30.6 per 100,000 is the highest of all services.
“Any commander would have at least one story like that, and it’s something you don’t ever, ever forget,” said Deskins, now the Guard’s director of manpower and personnel. “I see the faces that we lose to suicide.”
Deskins said 11 pilot programs now underway in nine states are developing a data-driven approach to change the way the National Guard looks at suicide. The culture shift aims to identify best practices, find metrics for early detection, and foster an environment of openness to discuss suicide and mental health.
“We really are a family in the National Guard,” she said. “It’s not unusual to have guard units that have generations within them, parents and children, and aunts and uncles, serve in the same unit. That makes this even more personal when you have a loss.”
The Guard is using $15 million in congressional appropriations over the last two fiscal years to finance the 11 programs and new proposals currently under consideration.
The state-specific pilots and data sets dig down to the county level to help the National Guard customize suicide prevention for a force that faces unique challenges not faced by the other services.
“Each state and each county has different problems that uniquely impact that county,” said Capt. Matthew Kleiman, a mental health practitioner who directs Warrior Resilience and Fitness for the Guard.
“We see our Guard members at varying rates. Sometimes we just see them on drill weekends,” he said, making it difficult to detect and treat mental health problems.
“We have people that live in a community that are maybe hundreds of miles from where they drill. That’s just the reality of it,” he added.
Kleiman said it was too early to assess lessons learned before pilot programs are complete in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, New Mexico, South Dakota, Montana, South Carolina, Georgia, and California, but there are some early signs of success.
A Massachusetts alcohol and drug abuse prevention program has turned the problem on its end, focusing on physical performance rather than treating mental health as a disease.
“When you look at behavioral health, so often there’s this mindset that someone who has a behavioral health issue is broken in some way and need to be fixed,” Kleiman said.
In the Massachusetts program, two events screened 800 service members, giving them an individualized performance program.
“When I say physical performance, we all know, in the military, what that means,” he said, referring to physical fitness tests and readiness. “You don’t have to be a broken person to benefit.”
Performance metrics that may help prevent suicide in the future, he explained, may include adverse actions following a deployment, such as a DUI or domestic abuse.
“Psychological fitness would also have performance measures, how resilient a person is, how they bounce back from a stressful situation,” he said. “We want to quantify performance in measurable terms.”
