A few readers have asked me what I think about reports that Veteran suicide rates are trending dismayingly high. It sounds bad, and whatever the accurate picture is, it is bad. But I am very skeptical about the numbers. Chris Orr has the right take, I think:

The implicit suggestion is that the toll of the Iraq war is higher than we ever dared imagine, that even after they return to the States, traumatized vets are as much, or even more, at risk for their lives as they were on the battlefield. The problem with this comparison is that there are vastly more U.S. veterans than soldiers who are serving, or have ever served, in Iraq. According to the 2006 census, there are 23.7 million veterans in the United States, of whom 9.2 million are over 65 and 8 million served in the Vietnam era; by contrast, just 1.9 million veterans are under 35. The Times article essentially admits as much in its 7th graph: “There are 25 million veterans in the United States, 1.6 million of whom [i.e., between 6 and 7 percent] served in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Moreover, the suicide rates cited by the Times appear to come from data going back as far as 1995, indicating that most of the deaths tallied predate the Iraq war.
None of this is to suggest that post-traumatic stress and other mental and emotional problems among veterans are not pressing issues. And they’re almost certain to get far, far worse when the soldiers who have been serving in Iraq (and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan) return home. But inflammatory comparisons between the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and the number of veterans (out of a vastly larger population) who commit suicide obscure far more than they clarify.