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Panelists at Hinckley Institute urge public-health approach to military suicide
Summary
At a University of Utah forum, mental-health and military experts said military suicide is best addressed through public-health strategies, better data and cultural change rather than single-policy fixes; they warned that aggregated DoD reports can obscure service-specific trends.
SALT LAKE CITY — Experts at a Hinckley Institute forum at the University of Utah on mental health in the armed forces on Friday urged policymakers to treat military suicide as a public-health problem that requires data-driven, systemwide responses rather than single explanations or quick fixes.
"Suicide when it happened was very difficult to predict," said Dr. Harold Cuddler, a former Veterans Affairs mental-health leader, summarizing years of VA and DoD work that shifted his emphasis from individual clinical encounters to population-level prevention. Cuddler described VA crisis lines, suicide-prevention coordinators and predictive analytics as vital tools, but he warned that many people who die by suicide are not captured by VA systems.
The panel, moderated by Corey Weathers, a clinical adviser on military morale and leadership, gathered clinicians, veterans-affairs leaders…
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