Suicide and the military: New York Army National Guard seeks to open dialogue, find a solution

FORT DRUM, NY, UNITED STATES

08.03.2013

Story by Pfc. J.P. Lawrence 

New York National Guard

FORT DRUM, N.Y.-- Ten members of the New York Army National Guard's 42nd Infantry Division spent two days of their two-week annual training period at Fort Drum, N.Y., learning about suicide and how to keep their fellow soldiers from taking that route. The class taught suicide intervention, the idea that a person who knows what they're doing can prevent a person with suicidal thoughts from performing suicidal acts. Through role-playing and through instruction, the soldiers learned how to identify a person at risk of suicide, and how to talk them "off the bridge."

Even in a classroom setting, Sgt. Zachary Dalrymple stood out. The intelligence sergeant was the kind of hard-charging and motivated soldier that scores high ratings on military fitness tests and gets promoted as soon as possible. The kind of soldier who loves to make decisions when no one else wants to. A soldier who yells, proudly, that the 'N' in Airborne stands for "Never quit."

So when Dalrymple told his fellow classmates that he once had thoughts of suicide, a hush fell over the room. One would never expect that a hard-charging soldier like Dalrymple could think of killing himself.

Dalrymple said it was a shock to him too.

Dalrymple was a student in a class of 10 soldiers, all members of various units of the 42nd Infantry Division. They were taking an Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training course during annual training at Fort Drum, N.Y.

The class taught suicide intervention, the idea that a person who knows what they're doing can prevent a person with suicidal thoughts from performing suicidal acts. Through role-playing and through instruction, the soldiers learned how to identify a person at risk of suicide, and how to talk them "off the bridge."

The New York National Guard began teaching the two-day, 15-hour ASIST program in January.

Since then, 11 ASIST instructors have taught 132 troops in Camp Smith, N.Y. and around the state. The ASIST model teaches that people who have suicidal thoughts give explicit and implicit warning signs, that a part of the person wants to commit suicide and that a part of them does not, and that by following certain guidelines a soldier can keep a person with suicidal thoughts safe.

"Most of the training we've done in the military, that I've done in my 17-year career, has been suicide prevention," Sgt. 1st Class Shaun Butcher, an ASIST instructor with the 106th Regional Training Institute, said. "What happens when prevention doesn't work? And somebody's still thinking of suicide or in the act of committing suicide? How do we help them?"

This was no ordinary suicide workshop. Many of the students said afterward that this class, with its various scenarios, really opened their minds to the gravity of suicide in the military.
In one exercise, each of the students was told to image a drive home from work on a cloudless Friday afternoon. "Now open your eyes," Butcher said. The next thing the class saw: another one of their instructors standing on the top of a chair. "There is a woman on the bridge," Butcher said. "What do you do?"

Another silence overcame the students as they groped for their next step. 1st Lt. Nathaniel Adams, one of the students, said he was "frazzled" when he opened his eyes. Oh god, he thought. How do I approach this? He said he could vividly imagine himself in the scenario, and he felt as if it all would have been overwhelming -- even the word "suicide" seemed daunting, something dark and eerie, something to stay away from.

For some students, these scenarios served as an introduction to the very concept of suicide. Staff Sgt. Richard Jones, for example, came into the class thinking of suicide as something that happened to people he didn't know. Jones, a maintenance sergeant with the 42nd Infantry Division Headquarters Support Company, said he had never thought of committing suicide, never knew anyone who committed suicide, and didn't have any opinions on it, really.

A significant portion of the class involved asking students to consider taboos and misconceptions surrounding suicide, and how attitudes and misconceptions about suicide can affect one's ability to help a person at risk. Even getting students like Adams comfortable saying the word "suicide" was an important step, so that students won't be nervous when they have to save a life and do a real intervention.

"Attitudes," Butcher said, "affect everything."

The ASIST program has notably been used at Fort Bliss, which has one of the lowest soldier suicide rates in the Army, -- four confirmed and one still under investigation from its population of 33,000 soldiers, down from seven in 2011.

More soldiers are trained in suicide prevention at Fort Bliss than at any other Army post. At Fort Bliss, 30 percent of soldiers receive ASIST training, compared to 3 to 5 percent Armywide, and the goal is 90 percent trained by 2015.

At Fort Bliss, signs detail how many days since the last "preventable soldier death." Incoming soldiers receive screenings and mandatory ASIST training upon arriving at Fort Bliss. Each company-sized unit or larger must submit a monthly list of soldiers with known emotional, financial or drug problems, and troops are tested for drugs eight times more often than normally required, reported the L.A. Times. There are tree-plantings and meditation, yoga, acupuncture and massage therapy.

But even with all these efforts, the post still reports two or four suicide attempts every day, and soldiers at Fort Bliss talked about killing themselves or someone else, or were admitted to the hospital psychiatric ward, more than 50 times a month on average in 2012.

This matches the grim numbers across the military. At least 2,700 service members are believed to have committed suicide since 2001. There were at least 349 confirmed suicides in 2012, almost a full platoon more than the 310 U.S. combat deaths during the same period. This is the highest number of suicides since the Department of Defense began keeping detailed statistics in 2001, and the number does not include an additional 172 suicides in 2012 by inactive reservists and National Guard members, the L.A. Times reported.

A number of assumptions fail to hold against scrutiny. More than half of the suicides in the military are troops who were never assigned to Iraq or Afghanistan, according to Pentagon data. Just one in 10 of those who died did so while posted in the war zone, and only 15 percent had ever experienced direct combat. In all, only 8 percent of suicide victims in 2011 had been deployed more than once.

While experts believe that post-traumatic stress disorder, hazing, multiple deployments and injuries from combat are more than likely contributing factors, it seems there is no standard formula that leads to suicidal thoughts.

After all, making assumptions is a good way to miss warning signs, Dalrymple said.

Dalrymple, the hard-charging sergeant, deployed to Afghanistan with the 173rd Airborne Special Troops Battalion, where he saw his team leader wounded in action and one of his best friends killed. But he didn't show any overt signs of trauma.

He came back from deployment and met the woman who would become his wife. He left the military, moved to Boston, enrolled in college. He was alone. He had left his friends in the Army, his team, his support structure.

His health suffered: anxiety attacks, a short temper. His physical fitness regressed from the peaks of his Airborne years. But he didn't think anything was wrong. He just thought he wasn't up to par. He just thought he was just unhappy.

Soon, the only thing that brought him joy was being with his wife - and then she deployed.

Now Dalrymple was fully alone. He said he would consider suicide for days at a time. Nothing definite, nothing planned - but the thought was there.

"It was - it was a pretty low point in my life, and it was one of those things where I couldn't keep my head above water, I couldn't do anything right like I used to," Dalyrmple said. "I was at the bottom, and I couldn't find a way up, and it was like that for months and months."

When his wife came home, the couple went to a marriage counselor. Within minutes, the counselor asked Dalyrmple if he had ever been treated for PTSD. "And I was like, 'no, are you crazy? I wasn't the one who was shot; I wasn't the one who was killed. I don't have PTSD,'" Dalyrmple said, but after some more questions he broke down and began talking.

Suicidal thoughts were something that happened to other people, and counseling was something Dalrymple never thought he'd need. For so long, he had to keep the bad thoughts out of his head without anyone to help him. But being about to talk to the other students in the ASIST course was like a "bear off his back," he said. It was the first time he had been able to talk in public about it.

Jones, in particular, took note of Dalrymple's story and the lessons from the ASIST class. Jones, the maintenance sergeant who said he didn't know anything about suicide, now takes care to watch for troubling signs in his soldiers.

"Seems like I'm always looking for signs now," Jones continued. "If I see a soldier sitting by himself or walking on their own, now I feel that it's my job to say 'hey, how're you doing? Why are you sitting by yourself? Let me sit with you.'"

Butcher said the ASIST classes are never as full as he'd like them to be. Many of the soldiers at the class said they had not wanted to go to the ASIST training. Dalrymple expected that it would be another slideshow, with people going through the motions: "Here's suicide, here's a card, don't do it." But after going through the course, he called it the best suicide prevention training he's ever had.

"Just be open with your soldiers," Dalyrmple said, "greet them, actually mean what you say, and actually receive what they're saying, and spend time with them. It just comes down to communicating with people and understanding."

• Date Taken: 08.03.2013
• Date Posted: 08.20.2013 15:57
• Story ID: 112287
• Location: FORT DRUM, NY, US