Soldier suicides are down, but violent crimes up: Army

• Reprints

Updated: February 21, 2012 8:43AM

WASHINGTON — The number of suicides among soldiers has leveled off, but there has been a dramatic jump in domestic violence, sex crimes and other destructive behavior in a force that has been stressed by a decade of war, a new Army report said Thursday.

“There’s a lot of good news in this report, but there’s also some bad news,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said at a Pentagon news conference. “We know we’ve got still a lot of work to do.”

There were 278 suicides last year among soldiers in the active duty, Guard and Reserve forces. That was down 9 percent from 2010.

“I think we’ve at least arrested this problem and hopefully will start to push it down,” Chiarelli said.

Violent sex crimes and domestic violence have increased more than 30 percent since 2006 and child abuse is up 43 percent.

Chiarelli released a report for commanders, health-care providers and other military leaders that’s meant to assess the physical and mental health condition of the force, disciplinary problems and any gaps in how the Army deals with them.

It follows a 2010 report that said the Army was failing some soldiers by missing signs of trouble or looking the other way as commanders tried to keep up with tight deployment schedules.

Chiarelli said commanders are getting more troops into substance-abuse programs; kicking more out of the service for misconduct and barring others with alcohol and drug convictions from joining.

Other details in the report:

† Calling post-traumatic stress disorder an epidemic, it estimates that there could be 472,000 service members with the condition, half of them in the Army.

† About 24,000 soldiers were referred to substance abuse programs in the 2011 budget year, ended in September.

† The Army had more than 126,000 diagnosed cases of traumatic brain injury from 2000 to 2010, including more than 95,000 mild cases such as concussions; 20,000 moderate cases and more than 3,500 cases of severe, penetrating injuries. AP