FRANKFORT, Ky. — Efforts are underway in Frankfort to address suicide prevention among the Kentucky National Guard.
Over the last decade, Major Timothy Olsen said suicide rates have ebbed and flowed.
“The only trends that are really holding consistently firm is that the entire veteran and military population does continue to have a significantly higher suicide rate than the general population,” Olsen said during a meeting on the Interim Joint Committee on Veterans, Military Affairs and Public Protection. “And so the conclusion we take from that is none of us are immune. None of us have figured it out. None of us have solved the suicide challenge yet and so we will not rest. We will continue to improve our programs until we see those numbers dramatically reduce and decrease moving forward.”
Olsen is the director of psychological health with the Kentucky Army National Guard. He said the overarching challenge is stigma.
“Stigma has gotten much better over the last five or ten years. However, there’s still a significant fear about engaging in mental health services and other types of support. When somebody is facing a suicidal crisis, there’s fear of how they’ll be perceived, if they’ll be perceived as weak, there’s fear that it will impact their career in a negative way,” Olsen said.
He said one of the biggest risk factors is firearms.
“Firearms access and the use of firearms is another very significant risk factor for our service members. We know our service members, unfortunately, die using a firearm far greater than the general population, that about 50% of suicides in the general population use firearms as the means of death; for our service members, it’s much higher,” Olsen explained.
In his report, he compared the general population’s suicide rate of 16.9 in 2020 to the Army National Guard’s rate of 27.2. So they’re working to dispel the stigma and reduce the rates with a holistic approach to wellness.
“Moving forward and getting more proactive, we see that real life is not quite that simple. It’s not quite that siloed and so a service member who’s struggling in one area of life is probably struggling with a lot of other components of health, and they all kind of overlap. It’s extremely difficult to try to understand and verify and predict exactly which stressor is going to cause a crisis and when,” Olsen said.
Some of their other efforts also include services from six full-time and fice part-time uniformed clinicians, educational suicide prevention programs and other counseling support.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story said suicide rates increased since 2011. They have actually fluctuated but have been higher among servicemembers than the general public. We have attached the data provided by the KYARNG. (Oct. 27, 2023)