Young female veterans of the U.S. military are nearly three times more likely to commit suicide than civilian women, according to a recent study co-authored by Portland State’s professor of community health Dr. Mark Kaplan, research associate Nathalie Huguet, Ph.D. and Oregon Health and Science University’s Dr. Brentson McFarland, a professor of psychiatry.
Studying female military suicides
Young female veterans of the U.S. military are nearly three times more likely to commit suicide than civilian women, according to a recent study co-authored by Portland State’s professor of community health Dr. Mark Kaplan, research associate Nathalie Huguet, Ph.D. and Oregon Health and Science University’s Dr. Brentson McFarland, a professor of psychiatry.
“Suicide among female veterans has received scant attention,” Huguet said.
The study, titled “Self-Inflicted Deaths Among Women with Military Service: A Hidden Epidemic?”was published in the American Psychiatric Association’s December issue of “Psychiatric Services,” a widely read peer-reviewed journal.
“When we think of suicide, particularly veteran or military suicides, we don’t think of women,” Kaplan said. “We suspected that the risk…of suicide among female veterans was higher [than among civilian women], but we didn’t know how much.”
By virtue of being female, women in the various military branches tend to face different psychological challenges than their male counterparts, according to Kaplan. These challenges often converge with the more widely known plethora of military challenges, including depression, anxiety, combat-induced PTSD, family conflicts and separations, redeployments and the stigma of weakness attached to seeking out mental health treatment.
The last of these is particularly poignant because it signals that female veterans are adopting stereotypically male coping behaviors, even self-destructive ones, according to Kaplan.
“Females who serve in the military often face a very masculine environment,” Kaplan said. “And in order to survive, they often acquire some of the same traits that we associate with men, which makes it more difficult for them to seek out treatment if they need it.”
In many cases, their adoption of male behaviors extends to committing suicide by means of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to Kaplan.
He said it is difficult for the public to imagine female veterans or active military women dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound because, in our minds, “guns and women simply don’t go together.”
“In a sense, we’re seeing the ‘masculinization’ of suicidal behavior,” Kaplan said.
Over a nearly two-year period, Kaplan and his researchers examined 5,948 death certificates of veteran and nonveteran women ages 18 to 34 that committed suicide in 16 states, including Oregon, between 2004 and 2007. They gathered this data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, a program funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study is a follow-up to the landmark 2007 study of suicides among male veterans, the latter of which was unprecedented in its scope and generated much media attention.
“This [2010] study was the logical next step that followed research on suicide among male veterans,” McFarland said.
Also conducted and co-authored by Kaplan, McFarland and Huguet, the 2007 study was the first population-based study that sought to determine the relative risk of suicide for male veterans and nonveterans alike. It found that, although veterans are as likely to die of natural causes as civilians, the risk of suicide among the former is twice as high as among the latter, according to Kaplan.
“Suicide rates appear to be elevated both for female and for male veterans in the younger age groups,” McFarland said.
Kaplan argues that the suicide statistics among female veterans are increasingly significant because, although women constitute only a small fraction of military personnel, the number of women serving continues to increase.
“With the growing presence of women in combat theaters, suicide rates are likely to increase,” Huguet said. “Therefore, clinicians should be aware of the warning signs.”
Kaplan and his researchers are currently examining the risk factors and precipitating circumstances that lead to veteran suicides, such as chronic alcoholism and the availability of firearms.
“I believe that we owe it to the veterans and their families to increase suicide prevention efforts, not only within the health care system…but also at the community level,” Huguet said.
She believes that additional suicide prevention programs targeting the needs of female veterans should be developed.
“The study on women continues to show that the risk of dying by suicide, regardless of whether you are young or old, male or female, is higher if you have served in the military,” Kaplan said. ?
