Portsmouth Naval Shipyard hosts a suicide awareness and prevention walk for employees, Sept. 25, 2024. (U.S. Navy photo by Branden Bourque) The number of veterans who died by suicide in 2022 — nearly 18 per day — remained steady from the previous year but was down from a peak in 2018, with "encouraging" signs of progress among women and younger veterans, Veterans Affairs officials said Thursday.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs ‘ two-part 2024 annual suicide prevention report released Thursday, 6,407 veterans died by suicide in 2022, compared with 6,404 in 2021, a rate of roughly 34.7 per 100,000.
In 2018 — the year with the highest number of veteran suicides in the past two decades — 6,722 veterans took their own lives. At the time, given the size of the veteran population, those deaths translated into a rate that was roughly 32 per 100,000.
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Although veteran suicides saw a slight uptick from 2021 to 2022, the increase — .7 per 100,000 — was smaller than the adjusted rate in the U.S. population, which saw a 1.8% rise among males and a 5.2% jump among females, according to Matthew Miller, executive director for the VA’s Suicide Prevention Office.
"[There are] notable changes within the data in terms of increase or decreases in veteran suicide prevention that provide aspects of hope regarding progress," Miller said in a roundtable with reporters prior to the report’s release. Chapters
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captions off, selected en (Main), selected This is a modal window.Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.End of dialog window.This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button.This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. The 2024 Annual National Veteran Suicide Prevention Report focused on 2022, the most recent year for which data was available from various sources, including VA records, the […]
Veteran Suicides Are Down Since 2018 But Remain Persistently Steady, New VA Report Finds
