From Awareness to Action: Suicide Prevention Support for the Military Community

Written by: Jason Jowers, MS, MFT

September is Suicide Prevention Month and it’s an important time to focus on suicide awareness and ways we as service professionals can support our clients. As we all know, suicide awareness and prevention isn’t just a one-month-a-year concern; it is an everyday concern. Suicide prevention efforts are also critical in our work with military service members and their families.

To highlight the need for continued and expanded suicide prevention efforts, the “Report on Incidence of Military Suicides by Military Job Code” (July, 2024) was released. This report is unique in that it provides data on the rates of suicide among U.S. military service members based on occupation/occupational codes from 2011-2022. This data is eye-opening, especially in providing insight into how the Department of Defense and military service professionals can create and facilitate ongoing suicide prevention efforts in the military community.

Report Statistics and Findings

“Between 2011 to 2022, the Department of Defense identified 5,997 Service members who died by suicide in both Active and Reserve Components” (July, 2024). Of those numbers, the top three occupations with the highest rates of suicide for enlisted at the time service members were:

Ordnance disposal and diving (34.77% suicide rate)
Infantry (31.28% suicide rate)
Missile guidance, control, and checkout (30.84% suicide rate)

These three occupations are high-stress jobs with little to no room for error, especially the ordnance disposal and diving jobs and missile guidance. Infantry is directly tied to providing lethal force in combat. All of these factors play a part in ratcheting up stress and anxiety levels for service members and surely affect all aspects of their lives. For service professionals working with military service members, inquiring about the details of their occupation can provide much-needed insight into how their job stress could be affecting their mental health. The Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS), the most evidence-supported tool of its kind can be used for suicidality assessment. To learn more about the C-SSRS, watch this on-demand OneOp webinar.

OneOp Suicide Prevention Programming and Resources

Service providers play an important part in suicide prevention and intervention for service members in all roles and occupations. For more resources and programming on suicide awareness, OneOp has several on-demand webinar recordings to share in helping clinicians and professionals who work with military families. Our “Public Health Approaches to Suicide Prevention: Working with Military Service Members” and “Public Health Approaches to Suicide Prevention: Working with Military Spouses and Families” webinars showcased the work of Dr. Keita Franklin as Co-Director for Columbia Lighthouse Project.

We also have the on-demand webinars, “Suicide Prevention and Working with Military Families” and “Suicide Prevention and Intimate Partner Violence.” Finally, our Practicing Connection podcast had a conversation about building an ecosystem of support and addressing issues upstream with Nicola Winkel, Project Director at the Arizona Coalition for Military Families. The episode, “An Ecosystem of Military Family Support with Nicola Winkel” goes into her team’s work in Arizona to bridge the gaps between various systems to provide support to military service members and their families.

Our OneOp programming is created to strengthen skill sets through the professional development of professionals like you — working within DoD’s Military Family Readiness System. Staying current on best practices, relevant resources, and support strategies strengthens not just us as professionals but also the capacity of the whole community to prevent suicide and mitigate suicidal behaviors for our military families, spouses, and service members.