Suicidal Paper
I was asked by my boss to review and “look for gaps in the logic flow” of a report prepared by the Soldier and Family Services division here at the National Guard. The report was nearly 40 pages long, but the only real substance was found in the first page with sentences like, “Army National Guard’s confirmed suicide rate reached an all-time high of 17.9 per 100,000,” and, “The intent of this campaign plan is to take a strategic approach to mitigating suicides and high-risk behavior across the Army National Guard.” Beyond that, the paper rambled on with long words and even longer sentences. I’m proud of the critique I wrote, provided below…
Two specific problems, and two general problems. First, the specifics:
The Situation, page 1, item 1: Is 17.9 suicides per 100,000 really something we need to have a ~40 page paper about? Looking at national statistics suggests that it’s not. In 2006, the US suicide rate for males was 17.7 per 100k and for women was 4.5 per 100k. Considering more than 85% of our force is male, we should expect an overall suicide rate of about 15.9 suicides per 100,000, so 17.9 isn’t that far off from what we should expect. These are back-of-the-envelope calculations, but the point still stands that the alleged suicide epidemic in the NG isn’t nearly as dire as the paper seems to suggest. Furthermore, I believe if we controlled for geography, race, and age, the expected suicide rate for the Guard would be higher, thus weakening the seriousness of the problem even further.
End State, page 2, item c: “The suicide is reduced” seems to be our goal — so if our suicides drop from 17.9 to 17.89, will we consider that success?
Then the general:
Even if I were to buy into the notion that I should be overly worried about the suicide rate, I didn’t see anywhere in the paper any sort of scientific or mathematical analysis to indicate why any of the proposals to reduce the rate should work. The paper just implies that we should all assume that the programs work, and that they all work equally well, so we should just dump lots of time, money, and effort into them. But if, for example, substance abuse programs are twice as effective at combating suicide as financial assistance programs, more resources should be put into the more effective programs.
Also, resources spent on suicide prevention likely have diminishing returns to effectiveness, meaning that the first $100k spent on suicide prevention will be more effective at reducing suicide rates than the tenth $100k. This implies that there is a point at which additional resources spent on suicide prevention will have such a miniscule effect on suicide rates that it is wasteful to spend those resources. This concept forms part of the basis for cost-benefit analysis, and while it is very unemotional and perhaps “inhuman” to suggest doing a cost-benefit analysis on resources spent toward suicide prevention, that’s ultimately the most rational choice. Perhaps these types of analyses have been done, but I read no reference to them in this paper.

