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Suicide has killed more troops than the war in Afghanistan this year
- By Alexander Abad-Santos
- Atlantic Wire
- June 8, 2012
- Comments
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
This is a pretty terrible statistic: 154 active duty troops have committed suicide in the first 155 days of the new year--a rate alarmingly close to one per day. The number dead from suicides eclipses the U.S. forces killed in Afghanistan by about 50 percent.
For comparison, there were around 130 suicide deaths during the same time last year, reports The Associated Press' Robert Burns. It's difficult to wrap our brains around that number and that rate, and of course that statistic is just one more troubling recent finding from our troops. (Remember the reports that found that sexual assaults among members of the army were up 64 percent from 2006? Or the rise in alcohol abuse?) "It's a sign in general of the stress the Army has been under over the 10 years of war," Dr. Stephen N. Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army general told Burns. "We've seen before that these signs show up even more dramatically when the fighting seems to go down and the Army is returning to garrison."
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