Attendees of the 7th Annual San Antonio Combat PTSD Conference listen to Craig Bryan presents on preventing firearm suicides at the Briscoe western Art Museum on Thursday.After years of rising suicides among troops in America’s armed forces, the Pentagon has some good news..“This is good. I mean, it’s good in the sense that it’s not as bad as the previous years,” said retired Army Col.
Castro and Alan Peterson, division chief of behavioral medicine and director at UT Health San Antonio’s STRONG STAR Consortium, saw the downturn in suicides as positive but added they couldn’t infer much from the data. The consortium is the nation’s largest combat-related research effort on post-traumatic stress disorder.
Bryan also was involved in a study released earlier this year by an independent committee that sought feedback from troops and their families on what does and does not work in suicide prevention. Established last spring by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the Suicide Prevention and Response Bryan cautioned that those examining the trends over the past two decades have noted brief downward dips that prompted false hope that things might be changing.
A recommendation not followed by the Defense Department was the panel’s call for tightening access to firearms for those considered at risk for suicide, an issue that goes to the heart of research for Bryan, who once worked in San Antonio.Some of the recommendations strongly emphasize firearm availability and access on base to include firearm purchases on military installations and taking steps to encourage secure storage of guns — as well as limits on who can buy them on installations.