Why Do Some Armed Forces Suffer More Suicides Than Others?
Any single suicide is an unspeakable tragedy. But public health officials should be especially alarmed when the numbers of suicides among a particular population spike. Between 2019 and 2023, the suicide rate across Canada fell from 12.3 per 100,000 to 9.5 per 100,000. U.S. numbers aren’t that different (although they’re heading in the other direction).
Against this context, the suicide rate among active Canadian military personnel is truly alarming. Data included in a 2021 Report on Suicide Mortality in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) showed that the three year moving average annual rate for suicides in all services of the CAF was 23.38 per 100,000 - around twice the national rate. Which, of course, is not to ignore the equally shocking suicide rates among military veterans.
This isn’t specific to Canada. All modern military communities have to worry about numbers like those. Officials in the Israel Defense Force - now hopefully emerging from their longest and, by some measures, costliest war ever - are struggling to address their own suicide crisis. But there’s a significant difference that’s probably worth exploring.
Through 2024, 21 active duty IDF soldiers took their own lives. This dark number has justifiably inspired a great deal of soul searching and, naturally (it being Israel), finger pointing. But the real surprise here is how low that number is.
It’s reasonable to estimate that there were 170,000 active duty soldiers in the IDF during 2024 and another 300,000 active reservists. If you count all of those together, the actual suicide rate is just 4.5 per 100,000 - which is less than half of the typical civilian suicide rate in Western countries!
Tragic. But hardly an epidemic. Those soldiers have all lost friends and faced battlefield conditions that I, for one, find impossible to even comprehend. And those 300,000 reservists? They’ve been torn away from their families, businesses, and normal lives for many months. Many have suffered devastating financial, social, and marital pressures. And still: we’re losing them at lower rates than most civilian populations!
Is there any lesson here that could help inform CAF policy?
One obvious difference is sense of purpose: IDF members are fighting for the very existence of their people. They all saw and felt the horrors of the October 7 massacres and know that there are countless thousands of adversaries who would be happy do it again in a heartbeat1. And having a general population that overwhelmingly supports their mission can only help that sense.
But there are some other factors that could be worth noting:
The IDF is unusual in that it subjects all potential conscripts to mandatory psychological screening - resulting in many exemptions.
Small, stable units are intentionally kept together for years. In fact, units are often formed from groups who have known each other since their early school years. This cohesion also helps with post-service integration.
Every IDF battalion has a dedicated officer trained in brief interventions and utilization rates are high.
Is there anything here that CAF officials could learn from?
Further reading:
Veterans Affairs: the Big Picture
While researching posts for The Audit, I’ll often confront massive datasets representing the operations of agencies with which I’m not in the least familiar. Getting to the point where all the raw numbers turn into a useful picture can take considerable effort, but it’s a satisfying process.
Veterans Affairs: Research Funding
I recently published an attempt to understand how the federal government cares for our veterans. If you haven’t yet, do take a few minutes to read about how hundreds of millions of dollars travel through dizzying layers of agencies and middlemen before they’re (presumably) spent on vets.
Decoding CAF’s Fitness Crisis: Insights from Reddit’s Frontlines
In a way, the Reddit social media platform’s bad reputation is undeserved. Sure, some parts of the ecosystem seem to attract populations of eccentric and/or nasty people (I’ll be devoting a full post to such populations later this week). And sure, some of the stuff you’ll read there doesn’t exist within the same universe as the word “reliable”. But Redd…
See this recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research which found that, as of October 2025, 53 percent of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank believed that the October 7 attack was correct.
Lack of purpose and cultural dissonance together with restlessness are the key intangible obstacles to military to civilian transition. As Cromwell said, "a soldier must know what they are fighting for and love what they know." The lack of Canadian community support and clear statement of Canada's international mission (viewed realistically not ideologically) negatively impacts soldiers, sailors, and aircrew while in service and particularly after service, when they return to a society that does not share the values of service, country before self, and team. Can you imagine the impact that the current debate on poppies in courts and schools and rampaging Islamist mobs have on those who sacrificed so much? Add to that the difficulty some face in finding civilian employment and one can see how despair takes over. A sense of purpose is key both before and after service. Lest we forget.
The regiment system worked to address your last issue but it only now exists at the Reserve level as the active units, being barely manned, are consolidated in just a handful of regiments. I would suggest that the most recent overseas missions were in support of the US and their record of not winning a war since WW2, not through any fault of the military itself but being involved in futile and ill-conceived missions, most recently in the Islamic wastelands - would be demoralizing in the extreme. The last decade has seen a militarily ambivalent government without purpose and being driven by the redundant since 1991, NATO, instead of our national defense considerations.
We are essentially in WW3 but the actions have been mostly limited to digital, biological?, commercial, infrastructure weakening, political interreference, Psy-ops (cultural Marxism from within, Islamization) etc as a shooting war could escalate to oblivion. Meanwhile Canada struggles through the politics of appeasing Trump, the insanity of NATO and our pathetic flanking of Russia in Latvia, and furnishing the military with expensive hardware that is arguably obsolete by delivery. IOW, when it comes to military morale, the fish stinks from the head.