Focus - Leadership and Culture
Asking the Hard Questions – Suicide Prevention By LT Erika “Misty” Anderson, USN
I
was on holiday leave back in 2017 when I got a call from a friend in my Fleet squadron. I had just walked out of a Kona Coffee on Maui and took the call without thinking, assuming it was just a funny story from a night out, or a question about workups. The last thing I expected to hear was, “Misty…he killed himself.” The green cliffs in front of me slid out of focus and I heard a buzzing in my ears. My stomach dropped, and the humid air suddenly felt cold. All I could get out was, “…What? No, he didn’t.” My friend had called to inform me that our fellow former squadron Junior Officer had committed suicide. In the days, weeks, and months afterward, my mourning squadron couldn’t make sense of it. With every crack of the 21-gun salute in the USS Midway’s hangar bay, the location of the memorial service, things seemed to add up less and less. . How could someone so vibrant, so personable, so alive, just simply not be here anymore? An HSC FRS instructor, mentor, friend, brother, and son, he was dedicated to his job and had made plans for the future. No one saw it coming. But…should we have? Anyone who has been in the Navy for more than one tour has most likely been around suicide, whether it be ideations, plans, or actions. I have been to many suicide prevention trainings in which the briefer has asked us to raise our hands if we’ve been affected by suicide while in the service. Nearly every hand goes up, every time. In fact, a study on suicide conducted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) last year yielded some alarming results: in a breakdown of both men and women, and those who are civilians or Rotor Review #155 Winter '22
veterans/active duty service members, the study found that veteran/active duty males are nearly two times more likely to contemplate, attempt, or succeed in suiciding than are their civilian counterparts. For veteran/active duty females, that number is almost five times greater than that of civilian women. But why? While I saw fewer cases of suicidal ideations and attempts at my Fleet squadron, I have had quite a different experience on my shore tour at HSC-2 as an Instructor Pilot with the collateral duty of Suicide Prevention Coordinator (SPC). While the FRS is a much larger command that’s staffed with a significant number of non-deploying personnel, I think a bigger difference is that I really started paying more attention. As the SPC, I generate a SITREP every time one of our Sailors is admitted to the psychiatric ward at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth – after my fifth or sixth SITREP since accepting the job, I did some digging. Suicide and military service have lead an embattled coexistence since the conception of an organized fighting force. While post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was only just accepted by the American Psychological Association as an actual mental health disorder in 1981, it has run rampant across the ranks for decades, the first documented cases of “shell shock” appearing in World War I medical journals for both American and British fighters. While PTSD has been mistakenly referred to exclusively as a “soldier’s disease,” we now know that only about 10 percent of modern cases of 26
