Suicides & War

For 40 years the army has been keeping close track of suicides among its officers and enlisted men. During the long dull years of peace the suicide rate tends to climb higher & higher in the service until a war comes and soldiers stop killing themselves. Just before the Spanish-American War army suicides reached a record high, only to drop away to almost nothing during the fighting. The same trend was discernible before the World War.

Since then the rate has again been rising. In 1933 nine officers and 48 men killed themselves, Surgeon General Robert Urie Patterson reported last week. Small though their ratio was to the 136,491 men in the Army, these self-inflicted deaths lifted the suicide rate more than half way to the high mark which apparently presages war.

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