Army alarmed by suicides rates of soldiers.

The U.S. military is losing a battle to stem an epidemic of suicides in its ranks, according to an article in PsychPORT.

The Department of Defense reported last week that there were 160 active-duty suicides in 2009, compared with 140 in 2008. This report only covered soldiers who were actively serving, and did not include the large numbers of soldiers who return from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and commit suicide in the months and years afterward, when they often suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome and have problems readjusting to civilian life.

“There’s no question that 2009 was a painful year for the army when it comes to suicides,” said Col. Christopher Philbrick, the Deputy Director of the Army Suicide Prevention Taskforce, despite “wide-ranging measures last year to combat the problem.”

Col. Elspeth Richie, the Director of Behavioral Health for the Office of the Army Surgeon General, is alarmed by the easy availability of handguns on army bases and the ongoing stigma attached to suicide, mental illness, and the treatment of mental illness, despite the army’s attempt to change. Elspeth says, “In many ways we talk out of both sides of our mouths.”

There have been a number of conferences, taskforces, training programs and studies devoted to the problem of suicide, yet the problem gets worse. Soldiers who receive counseling are still committing suicide. “Many soldiers think that seeking treatment could ruin their army careers,” Elspeth notes.

Suicide among solders is not new. During the Viet Nam War of the 1960s and 1970s, almost as many soldiers committed suicide during and after the war as were killed in combat—about 60,000. The alarming rate of suicides associated with this war has been attributed to the unpopularity of the war.

This statistic has been largely hidden, as the army views suicides as shameful. It is a problem the army wishes would just go away. And the counseling they have devised to work with soldiers who have a suicidal tendency is geared to making them stop being a problem for the army as soon as possible. Nothing will make a suicidal person commit suicide faster than someone giving him the message he is being a nuisance.

The army’s attitude, however, is no different than the attitude of society in general. Suicide has historically been stigmatized. And mental illness has historically been stigmatized as well. Like the army, society is not particularly interested in understanding why people are suicidal. Society simply wants to put suicidal people on some kind of medication or some kind of quick fix program and get them out of their irksome funk as quickly as possible.

What I’ve learned about suicides during my 30 years of practice with suicidal people is that the all of them suffer from some kind of mental anguish, and the most effective way of helping them is to provide them with an empathic listener who will give them the space the talk through and unravel the conflicts inside of them.

Listening is not something the army—or most people—do well.

Do people want to know the truth?

If someone told you that something you believed was, in fact, not the truth, would you want to hear them out? According to a recent study, most people are not interested in finding out the truth. Most people would rather find out that what they believe to be the truth is the truth…and nothing but the truth.

In other words, they tend to pay more attention to those who agree with them.

So says a meta-study that was reported recently in Psychological Bulletin published by the American Psychological Association. The research project was led by professors at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida and included data from 91 studies involving nearly 8,000 participants.

The studies they reviewed generally queried participants about their opinions on a given topic and then allowed them to choose whether they wanted to view or read information that backed up their opinions or information that opposed them. The result: people are likely to select information that supports their point of view 67% of the time and are willing to consider opposing viewpoints only 33% of the time.

The study found that people are least interested in new points of view when their own views are associated with political or religious ideas. “If you are really committed to your own attitude—for example, if you are a very committed Democrat, you are more likely to seek congenial information, that is, information that corresponds with your views,” noted one of the authors, Deloris Albarracin.

When it comes to religion and politics, people tend to prefer viewing or reading information that is in agreement with their own thinking 70% of the time.

Cognitive psychologists—those who study the way people process and interpret information—refer to the tendency of sticking to an old way of looking at things and resisting a new or different way, as a “mental set.” This recent research appears to confirm the theory of the mental set.

Mental sets can hinder both individuals and groups in a range of ways. Mental sets come into play, for example, when you are trying to solve a problem in algebra. You keep trying again and again to find the solution and yet you can never find it. You go to sleep frustrated, and when you awake you suddenly try something completely different and, wham! You have the answer.

However, mental sets can be most harmful when it comes to human problems. A husband and wife continually have the same argument and neither will see the other side. Ethnic groups can’t stop feeling superior to each other. Liberals and conservatives can’t give up believing they are completely right and their opponent is completely wrong. Countries go to war rather than trying a new way of resolving their disputes.

The irony is that often those who regard themselves as open minded are in fact the most closed minded. They are closed minded about admitting they are closed minded.

Keats said, “Truth is beauty, beauty truth...and that is all ye need to know.” But most people say, “My way of thinking is truth and my way of thinking is beauty, and that is all I want to know.”