LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Army National Guard members must intervene to ensure suicides continue to decline from last year’s record numbers, the acting director said here Sunday.
With 112 suicides last year, senior National Guard leaders set a goal in January to halve that number, and Army Maj. Gen. Raymond Carpenter says that – despite a surge in recent months – the Army Guard is doing much better than last year.
“If senior leaders go back to their units and say, ‘hey, we have to re-double our efforts,’ and everybody gets a heighted awareness of suicide, I’m hopeful that will cause people to intervene,” he said at the National Guard Senior Leadership Conference here.
“Effective suicide prevention happens between two people – somebody who has a problem and somebody who helps them,” he said.
“We can do a lot of things at the senior leader level – we can emphasize, we can resource – but where the intervention happens, where somebody stops a suicide, that happens between two Soldiers or a Soldier and another caring person.”
In 2010, suicides were committed 93 percent of the time by males; 77 percent were white; 60 percent were single; 46 percent were of the ages 17 to 24 and 26 percent were of the ages 25 to 29, Carpenter said.
With the number dropping, Carpenter commended his fellow senior leaders, but added that winning this battle will take help from family members and communities.
“Anybody who has a close relationship with a Guard member contemplating suicide needs to know that they can contact the leadership of the National Guard, and we are going to support any kind of intervention we can possibly resource,” he said.