A study done by the America’s Warrior Partnership called Operation Deep Dive implies that former service members commit suicide at a rate 2.4 times greater than that reported by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The group has taken the information and applied it to reach veterans before it’s too late.
“Our approaches, we call it upstream, to get way upstream from the crisis, build a relationship early on, help veterans and their families know that somebody has their back, and that they're not alone,” Jim Lorraine, CEO and president of AWP, said. “And then we will help them get connected to services or resources that improve their quality of life and as their quality of life improves, what happens is that their risk for suicide goes down.”
Lorraine served in the U.S. Air Force as a flight nurse with nine combat deployments. He retired as the deputy command surgeon for the United States Special Operations Command after 22 years of service.
For five years AWP worked with the University of Alabama while being sponsored by the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation to conduct the study.
Operation Deep Dive includes data collected from eight states and corroborated with the Department of Defense. The time frame covers 2014-2018 and the states Alabama, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, and Oregon.
AWP said that if these states were to represent the national rate, the combined rate would be at least 44 former service members committing suicide every day. That would be 2.4 times higher than the suicide rate recognized by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Russel Lemle, a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, sent and email to WGCU News, calling the AWP study flawed and misleading. Lemle provided links to two articles that contradict the suicide findings by AWP.
Here is one link: https://www.mdedge.com/fedprac/article/258954/health-policy/va-gets-it-right-suicide
Lemle said this link is a commentary in Military Medicine: https://academic.oup.com/milmed/advance-article/doi/10.1093/milmed/usac340/6901917
Regardless of statistics and studies, suicides by veterans remains an issue.
The 2020 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report said that “the problem of suicide reflects a complex interaction of factors placing strain on individuals at the international level (e.g., wars, global pandemic), national level (e.g., economic disparities, health care policies), community level (e.g., employment rates, access to care), familial and relational level (e.g., level of support, relationship problems), and individual level (e.g., health concerns).”
"[The study] helps us understand the veteran who has the highest probability for taking their life within a given community,” Lorraine said.
AWP’s partnership with the Department of Defense allows the group to verify data collected in the study with their records. Lorraine says AWP looks at veterans by age, race, gender, socioeconomic status, military history including where they served, for how long and what they did.
“You can come back and say, ‘Okay, the veteran at greatest risk in a community within Florida has this pair of these characteristics.' And then what we say to the community is, ‘let's go find those people, let's find them early, let's build a relationship with them, let them know that suicide is not a good option,’” Lorraine said.
Corporal Tim Belizaire, 29, of Estero, served in the United States Marine Corp as an aviation electrician from 2017 to 2022. He says he was lucky to have a non-combat job and a strong support system when he got out of the Marines, but some don’t.
“It’s crucial because it can be fatal. Service members are taught to solve emotional problems by sucking it up,” Belizaire said. “There are programs in place that, in theory, help but it may impede a promotion or certain opportunities while on active duty. Veterans will then internalize that attitude and not get help when they get out. There’s also the issue of not knowing where to get help and not getting adequate help when that person actually seeks it.”
Belizaire was able to save money while living with his mother. He also got a restaurant job right away and utilized the G.I. Bill to go to school.
“As proud as I am to be a Marine, it doesn’t define myself as much as it does someone who joined at 18,” Belizaire said. “To the 18-year-old who gets out after one term, they’re experiencing the “real-world” for the first time and that can be a culture shock. And if you mix that with a combat veteran who’ve seen the worst humanity has to offer, it’s not a pretty combination.”
Belizaire started attending Florida Gulf Coast University this year. He joined the Student Veterans of America and met Troy Bolivar, the director of Military and Veteran Success at FGCU.
“Troy has been a Godsend,” Belizaire said. “I knew I wanted to go into journalism, but I was aimless. He’s given me opportunities I would have never received so soon. He’s taught me so much and he’s given me the opportunity to learn from so many people and to interact with fellow student veterans I might have never interacted with.”
The Florida Department of Veterans’ Affairs outlines all the benefits and services available to veterans on its website.
"We find 85% of the veterans that we engage with in the community are looking to give back, they're not looking for services, they're looking to give back and volunteerism, mentorship, peer networking, they may be a hiring official that's looking to hire veterans. If you mobilize the strength of veterans in a community, you'll improve the quality of life of everyone in the community,” Lorraine said.
Lorraine says that along with the importance of behavioral and mental health therapy comes guiding veterans to a purposeful life.
“Hopelessness is big thing,” Lorraine said. “When you leave the military service, you feel like you're part of something larger than yourself, you have some significant structure that helps you understand, that helps you get through your days and understand where you need to be at any given time and maybe give the structure that you that you probably need through your life.”
Losing a sense of purpose can cause veterans to spiral. Lorraine admits that he’s lost peers to suicide, but every other service member likely has, too.
The other thing that Operation Deep Dive did was it opened our eyes to the real epidemic of overdose, especially amongst the veteran community.Jim Lorraine, CEO and president of American Warrior Partnership
"When I left military service, and I became a civilian, I used to say to other people that never served in the military, I don't know how you do this,” Lorraine said. “In the military, when I walked into a room, I knew if there were 10 people in the room, I knew just from their uniform, who they were, where they were, what their background was, I knew so much about them and I knew that for the most part, if I was in a jam, they would help me out.”
AWP found that approximately 20 former service members die per day by self-injury mortality, which previously was listed as accidents/undetermined. More than 80% of the deaths are coded as overdoses.
"The other thing that Operation Deep Dive did was it opened our eyes to the real epidemic of overdose, especially amongst the veteran community," Lorraine said. "And while some overdoses are classified as suicide, the majority of overdoses are classified as either accidents or undetermined and undetermined death.”
The AWP website also points out that some deaths are classified as self-injury instead of suicide, such as deaths by overdose, asphyxiation, accidental gunshot, drowning, suicide by law enforcement, and high-speed, single-driver accidents. The Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute differs on whether some of these deaths can be classified as suicides.
A branch of AWP located in Florida called the Panhandle Warrior Partnership focuses on understanding the needs of veterans specifically living in the state.
"The focus there is: build a relationship with a veteran, understand who they are, have them know who they can turn to if they need help and then quite frankly, go find more veterans, and then build a community of veterans within the community. That's the key and homelessness is a part of that," Lorraine said. “If I needed to find the homeless veterans, I have a number of places I could go to find them. If I want to find a veteran who's isolated themselves, that's hard.”
The next steps for Operation Deep Dive are to move to Duke University to expand the data set over the next four years. Then the program hopes to develop strategies that can be used at the county, state and national levels to prevent former service member deaths, according to the website.
AWP wants to increase the number of states sharing data with Operation Deep Dive, incorporate VA data and work with government and non-government stakeholders to use data findings to help prevent former service member suicide and self-injury mortality.
The group plans to further analyze the cause of death in relation to factors such as years of military service, time since discharge, deployment history and incidents occurring during military service. Services received from the Department of Veterans Affairs and from a stateside community also will be factored into the analysis.
Specifics about Operation Deep Dive can be viewed on its website.
This story was produced by FGCU Journalism's Democracy Watch course. Hayley Lemery can be reached at hklemery9681@eagle.fgcu.edu