How is the Army doing on suicide prevention training? Are we more prepared?

I agree with you that it needs to be more than just a kill-me-with-PowerPoint event. That does little to improve and everyone just wants to get the heck out of there. We actually had a pretty good event recently here in DC. The Military District of Washington (MDW) hosted MG (R) Graham and his wife to discuss some of the stigmas and how we get beyond them. They had a son in ROTC who killed himself and eight months later lost their other son to an IED in Iraq. It was a very heartbreaking story, but has a very powerful message of how we need to get beyond the stigmas so we can truly address the problems. I enjoy these type of events and actually get something out of it as opposed to just showing me some stats on who has been killing themselves by rank, age, and sex. To advance this discussion, we need to go beyond simple numbers and stats!

I guess there's the key. Are we, or have we, saved any lives as a result of training? That's a very hard metric to measure really. I think there is value to the training so long as it isn't just another boring class that people only attend because they are forced to.

Not to say that I don't care about our Veterans, because I definitely do (I'm about to be one afterall). But I'm more looking at how our current military personnel are affected. I hope that the VA and other outside services are assisting our Veterans (though I'm not overly confident on that), but it's not the Veterans sitting through continuous suicide prevention training classes discussing why our Soldiers are killing themselves by the hundreds every year. Are we even making an impact? Or are we just trying to make it look like we're doing something? I want to think that we are making a difference, but it sure doesn't seem that way. And at the same time we're talking about all the stress we're causing with deployments and military life in general, we're increasing anxiety by beginning the draw down which will leave even more uncertain about their future.

I concur Chris, The Military is great at teaching us to kill our fellow human beings and how to use wonderful high tech killing equipment but other stuff it kinda drops the ball at.

Some things never change.