As soldier suicides rise amid COVID isolation, Army looks to faith and connection
Military chaplains and leadership at Fort Bragg are working on ways to alleviate the isolating factors of the pandemic that can exacerbate mental health pressures on soldiers, as new data shows the number of suicides at the North Carolina base during the first eight months of this year is the highest since 2016.
It is one example of the concerns at the Defense Department over the potential complicating factors that COVID-19 has had on a force already stressed by the pressures of multiple deployments.
“I’m very concerned with the trends in the military,” Dr. Karin Orvis, director of the Defense Department’s suicide prevention office, told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday.
The department released its military-wide suicide data for 2019 and the first quarter of 2020. Across the active duty, National Guard and reserve forces, 501 service members died by suicide in 2019. During the first quarter of 2020 — January through March — just as the first social distancing military restrictions for the coronavirus were being instituted, 124 service members across the force had killed themselves.
“There is an overall increase in suicides, in deaths by suicide across the active duty Army for 2020,” Dr. James Helis, director of the Army’s resiliency office, said in a phone interview with McClatchy.
In data released separately by the Army to McClatchy, as of Sept. 3, across five of the Army’s largest non-training bases -- Fort Bragg, Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas, Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state and Fort Campbell in Kentucky -- 44 soldiers had killed themselves in 2020, compared with 49 in all of 2019.
At Fort Bragg, 15 soldiers had died by suicide as of Sept. 3, matching the high it registered in all of 2016. Joint Base Lewis-McChord had registered nine suicides, the same number it recorded in all of 2019, and Fort Campbell had registered seven suicides as of Sept. 3, compared with four suicides in all of last year.
Orvis said it was still too early to determine what impact the pandemic has had on the rate of military suicides, but acknowledged the Defense Department was already making changes to take COVID-19 into account, such as focusing on connectedness.
At Fort Bragg, part of that responsibility falls to its 120 chaplains who serve the 50,377 military personnel assigned to the base.
“What’s important to note for chaplains is that we are confidential,” said Fort Bragg 18th Airborne Corps chaplain Col. Eddie Cook. “Many times these soldiers that are going through trials and issues don’t want to talk about it or don’t want to bring it out to command awareness or even into medical records.”
“Anyone struggling with suicide is struggling with a wounded soul,” Cook said. “And that’s the chaplain’s role and lane, to care for that wounded soul.”
Cook said that he and other chaplains look for some of the common factors they have seen in people who feel suicidal. He said they often express “a sense of loss in relationship, a sense of loss, maybe financial, a sense of loss of legal problems. Something that seems to be spiraling, that they feel hopeless.”
When the initial COVID restrictions were implemented, Fort Bragg’s worship halls and community centers closed. Some bases instituted stricter quarantines than others. The Air Force Academy, for example, ended its policy of requiring its graduating seniors to self-isolate in their dorms rooms last spring after two cadets who were about to graduate committed suicide.
Fort Bragg had thousands of soldiers in the Middle East, including 3,500 who deployed in response to rising tension with Iran and attacks on the U.S. embassy in Iraq when the pandemic struck in the United States. Thousands of those soldiers who had deployed pre-COVID returned home to a base that had new restrictions and required quarantines.
Cook and Capt. Allen Lee, the division psychiatrist at Fort Bragg, said social distancing should instead have been called physical distancing, because in some cases it led to unintentional social isolation. The base is focusing on outdoor community gatherings, such as a recent drive-in movie where military personnel and families were assigned golf carts to watch “Forrest Gump” together on a large screen on the base driving range.
The 82nd Airborne Division’s commanding general also recently began holding “All American Days,” where they cease training and scheduled obligations to strengthen connections between the enlisted troops and their officers.
“Essentially what we’re doing is we’re setting aside one day per month as a day for leaders to better get to know their soldiers,” Lee said. “I know some of the language that [the commanding general] has used is that we’re ‘a division of strangers.’ I think that leaders, they want to care for their soldiers. Some of them may not know how.”
“So we’ve developed some tools, a counseling tool, that helps them to understand their soldiers’ stories, helps to identify some key risk factors and to uncover some areas in which they can assist or help their soldiers.”
This story has been updated to clarify that the All American Days were started by the 82nd Airborne Division commanding general.
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 1:50 PM with the headline "As soldier suicides rise amid COVID isolation, Army looks to faith and connection."
