Army Creates Suicide Prevention Task Force

The Army has created a suicide prevention task force as part of its month-long “stand-down” to address suicides among soldiers, the service’s vice chief of staff said yesterday. …

In keeping with the complexity of the problem, the task force will have members from a range of staff sections and functional areas. “My charter is … to look across all disciplines so… commander[s] can have a menu of tools and training programs and experts and know how to best deploy them,” McGuire said.

The task force will include representatives from the Army’s offices of personnel and human resources, the provost marshal’s office, and the medical department, and it will coordinate closely with the chief of chaplains, Lt. Col. Leo Ruth, a task force member, said in an interview with Army News Service. The task force will examine all of the Army’s recent suicides and try to find commonalities, Ruth said. …The ultimate product, he said, will be a suicide prevention campaign plan.     

The task force will only form the genesis of the campaign plan, Ruth said, stressing that the task force is a temporary organization. The Army also has partnered with the National Institute of Mental Health for a long-range study to determine the causes of suicide in the Army.

An Armywide “stand down” for suicide prevention training continues through March 15 whereby commands and individual units take part in four-hour training sessions on how to recognize and try to prevent suicides.

The centerpiece of the training is an interactive video called “Beyond the Front” that Chiarelli told online journalists is “some of the best facilitation for training that I’ve seen in 36 years in the Army.” He said the purpose of the video is to reduce the stigma of seeking help, to teach soldiers to recognize the signs of suicide and how to provide help to a buddy.

It’s especially important for junior officers and noncommissioned officers to train with the video and be able to offer intervention to soldiers at risk, Chiarelli said.

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A glimpse at the "Beyond the Front" video — a note of caution: some jarring/violent scenes open the piece:

Alarmed by a record rate of suicide in its ranks, the Army has unveiled a unique prevention tool — an interactive video to be mandatory viewing Army-wide — in which soldiers will play the role of an anguished infantryman and make virtual choices that lead the character to get help or, in the worst case, shoot himself in the head.

The video is one of several initiatives launched by the Army to try to stem the suicide rate among active-duty soldiers. That rate increased from 12.4 per 100,000 in 2003, when the Iraq war started, to 18.1 per 100,000 in 2007.