US military suicides hitting record: Report

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The number of American troops committing suicide has increased to nearly two a day, with experts beginning to take notice of its deleterious effects, Press TV reports.
 “I think we’ve paid more attention to it. The data wasn’t too good in the beginning. They really don’t take it seriously till 2010. The other thing that’s happening is the cumulative effect,” said Lary Korb, a US military health advocate.
This is while a new US military report released last week recorded 161 potential suicides among active US troops and service members in 2013, indicating that the pace of self-inflicted deaths is set to rival the record rate in 2012.
The military registered 349 suicides or one every 17 hours in 2012, much higher than the 295 American soldiers who died in Afghanistan during the same period.
 “They don’t really talk about it. It’s not something the people - I mean I don’t know it that close enough that they would tell me about it,” said Richard Weitz, a US foreign policy expert.
Experts predict the military suicide rate to increase in the next couple of years as more troops are returning from Afghanistan.
According to a research by the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah, published last week, there is a connection between the number of concussions or traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and the risk of suicide.
A Pentagon survey also shows that 266,810 service members received a TBI between 2000 and 2012 and of those more than 80 percent were not deployment-related cases.
The majority of TBI cases came either from their own outgoing rockets or from crashes of privately-owned cars and military vehicles, according to the Pentagon survey.

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