580 Service Members Die by Suicide in 2020, New Pentagon Report Says
Sept. 30, 2021 | By
Greg HadleyFive hundred and eighty service members died by suicide in 2020, the Pentagon announced Sept. 30, when the Defense Department released its
annual suicide report.
Those 580 deaths mark the most the DOD has recorded
in at least five years, with the Active-duty component accounting for 384, the Reserve for 77, and the National Guard for 119. In the Air Force, 81 Active-duty members, 12 Reservists, and 16 Air National Guard members committed suicide in calendar year 2020, according to the report.
“The findings are troubling. Suicide rates among our service members and military families are still too high, and the trends are not going in the right direction,” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “This is a paramount challenge for our department. We must redouble our efforts to provide all of our people with the care and the resources they need, to reduce stigmas and barriers to care, and to ensure that our community uses simple safety measures and precautions to reduce the risk of future tragedies.”
While the total numbers increased, the Defense Suicide Prevention Office found that the rate of suicides per 100,000 individuals did not increase by a statistically significant margin from 2019 to 2020, assuaging some
fears that the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to a surge.
“But that doesn’t mean we are standing by,” said Army Maj. Gen. Clement S. Coward, acting executive director of the Office of Force Resiliency, in a press briefing. “When we start talking about the data and what it could indicate, we have always known that COVID and the measures to respond to it have presented unique challenges that would include risk factors for some folks. That’s why we’re not only continuing to monitor this, but we’re also continuing to be relentless to mitigate the [effects] as much as we can.”
Based on rates per 100,000, the only component to see a statistically significant increase from 2019 to 2020 was the National Guard, which had seen a drop from 2018 to 2019—the increase now puts the rate at roughly the same level it was in 2018.
From a longer-term perspective, though, the Active-duty component has seen a statistically significant increase in suicide rates since 2015, going from 20.3 deaths per 100,000 to 28.7.