College students who served in the military have a suicide attempt rate six times higher than the average college student, suggests research presented Thursday at a meeting of the American Psychological Association. It found students who are veterans also report thinking about suicide or planning their death at significantly higher rates.
Researchers with the National Center for Veterans' Studies at the University of Utah surveyed 525 veterans, average age 26. Almost all (98%) had been deployed in either Iraq or Afghanistan and 58% to 60% reported experiencing combat.
Nearly half (46%) of the 415 men and 110 women studied reported having had suicidal thinking sometime in their lives; 20% had suicidal thoughts with a plan. That compares with 2010 data from the American College Health Association, which showed 6% of college students reported seriously considering suicide.
Suicidal thinking with a plan is considered a serious suicidal risk, says lead author M. David Rudd, a psychologist at the Utah center, who presented the study. "That's more than triple the general student population," he says. "There's been an enormous amount of research on veterans in general, but not veterans on campus."
The survey of veterans also found that 7.7% reported a suicide attempt, compared with 1.3% of college students overall who reported attempting suicide.
The Student Veterans of America, a national coalition that represents about 20,000 students who are veterans, distributed the survey to both full-time and part-time students this year.
"Many of these men and women who serve our country are barely out of adolescence," says clinical psychologist Barbara Van Dahlen of Washington, who founded Give an Hour, an organization that provides free mental health care to returning troops and their families. "There are a lot of reasons for concern about these very young men and women who have been put in harm's way."
Rudd says it's unclear how many veterans go to school after their military service, but he says estimates suggest almost 1million have left the military since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Estimates over the course of the next decade suggest we'll see more than a million veterans on campus, but no one has looked specifically at this yet," he says.
The University of Texas-Austin is among the campuses working to help student veterans.
"We've been aware over the last few years that we would be expecting more and more college veterans on our campuses, so in preparation for that, we want to make sure we have services in place to support them while they're here," says Chris Brownson, director of UT-Austin's Counseling and Mental Health Center.
This fall, the university will have a campus psychologist devoted to student veterans, an effort funded by a grant from the Veterans Administration. More details about the program will be presented today at a session about this emotional transition.
Rudd says the overwhelming majority of those with serious suicide risks are struggling with post-traumatic stress symptoms, which include significant anxiety, intrusive thoughts, sleep disturbances and recurring images of what happened in combat.
"The data we uncovered actually indicates these men and women are at more significant risk than veterans seeking care from the VA," he says.
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