Suicide among veterans receiving less attention than active-duty deaths

After coming home from Iraq, Ray Rivas life had become a grind of rehab and chronic pain from a brain injury. On that morning in July 2009, he told his wife he hadnt slept the night before the headaches that had plagued him since a mortar shell exploded near him three years earlier often robbed him of sleep.

But Colleen Rivas said her husband was in good spirits as he drove away from their New Braunfels home.

He left with a doughnut in his hand and a smile on his face, she said.

Instead of going to his vocational rehab session at Easter Seals in San Antonio, the 53-year-old Army Reserve lieutenant colonel drove to Brooke Army Medical Center and overdosed on sleeping pills in a parking lot. A suicide note was found with his body.

I was totally caught off guard, Colleen Rivas said. Three years later, Im still shocked at what he did.

A drumbeat of media attention has accompanied the toll of active-duty suicides, along with a stack of official reports with titles like Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide and growing alarm from the Department of Defense and Congress. Military suicides jumped about 50 percent between 2001 and 2008 and reached new highs this year: The 26 suicides in July more than doubled the Armys total from the previous month. The Marines already have equaled their suicide total for all of 2011.

But veterans such as Rivas, who die after leaving the military, are not included in the death count of Americas wars. And no one including the Department of Veterans Affairs seems to know how many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are killing themselves after they are out of the service.

An American-Statesman investigation into the deaths of 266 Texans who served during the Iraq or Afghanistan wars show that 45 committed suicide, making it the fourth-leading cause of death behind illness, accidents and drug-related deaths. That percentage is more than four times higher than the general population: Suicide accounted for 3.6 percent of all Texas deaths over the same period, compared with 16.9 percent of the veterans the newspaper studied.

More than half of the veterans committed suicide before their 30th birthdays. The youngest was 22; Rivas was the oldest at 53. All but one of the 45 confirmed suicide victims were men.

Its likely that the elevated numbers are at least partially explained by differences between the veterans and the general public. The veterans were predominantly male men are much more likely to die by suicide than women and all of them were VA patients who had been declared disabled to some degree (the disability could be as serious as cancer or as minor as skin rashes).

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Suicide among veterans receiving less attention than active-duty deaths