1. Demonstrate Evidence of Close Reading

Directions: 1. Demonstrate evidence of close reading. 2. Highlight or circle the support provided and label its type (LADS SHARE) 3. On a separate sheet of paper, summarize the argument of each piece.

How Can We Prevent Military Suicides? The statistics are endlessly grim: From 2005 to 2010, service members have killed themselves approximately once every 36 hours. For veterans, the rate is estimated at once every 80 minutes. Why do so many current and former service members, including those who are never deployed, kill themselves? How can the U.S. reduce that suicide rate?

What We Know, and Don’t Margaret C. Harrell is a senior fellow and Nancy Berglass is a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for a New American Security. They are the authors of "Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide."

The effect of suicide by military service members and veterans is far greater than the numbers can convey. Each case represents, first and foremost, a tragic loss for the families, units and communities. There are also repercussions for public health and national security.

Our country lost 295 active duty service members to suicide in 2010. Because the military services count and examine suicide, we know the proportion who died during or after deployment. We know that only in the Army are people who have been deployed more likely to kill themselves. We know the means by which service members take their own lives: in 2010, 48 percent with a personally owned firearm, 14 percent a military firearm, and 25 percent by hanging. We know whether these individuals were experiencing financial, legal or relationship crisis. What we do not yet know is how to stop these suicides, but knowing who they were and what circumstances they faced is a critical first step.

Veteran suicides are a different matter. The V.A. estimates that 18 veterans die by their own hand every day, but this is not definitive. Because veterans are civilians and thus not required to report on themselves, we know little about them. We do not count veterans’ suicides by which service they were in, whether they deployed, or to what war. We do not know whether the veterans with mental health challenges -- especially those not enrolled with the V.A. -- have mental health wounds from the current or earlier wars, or whether the struggles are independent of their military service. When veterans die by suicide, we, as a nation, are at a complete loss to understand who they were or why they chose to end their lives. Until we do, we remain unable to address the problem.

Mounting Tolls of a 10-Year War M. David Rudd, the dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Science at the University of Utah, is the scientific director of the National Center for Veterans Studies.

Suicide is undeniably a function of psychiatric illness, with well over 90 percent of those taking their lives suffering from a diagnosable mental illness at the time of death. There is little argument among experts that increasing numbers of military personnel, both those with and without combat exposure, are struggling with psychiatric symptoms. The role of deployment and multiple deployments is a bit more complex, particularly given that a considerable number of those dying by suicide have never been deployed. The numbers vary across service branches, but over the last two years, estimates for the Army hover around 25 percent to 30 percent of those dying by suicide have had no deployment history.

Regardless of whether a soldier is deployed, the operational tempo of the military during wartime is fast paced and pressure-filled. Soldiers in garrison are in constant preparation for war, meaning more time in the field and less time with family and loved ones. For those that return from combat, it means that when they are home, they’re not entirely at home, as the demands of preparing for the next deployment are considerable. The net result is enormous strain on the system and the individuals who make up that system, including family members and civilian employees. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen these high levels of stress manifest in progressively higher rates of major depression, post-traumatic stress symptoms and substance abuse, all clearly implicated in the escalating suicide rates regardless of deployment status.

For those with multiple deployments and repeated combat exposure, it is becoming increasingly clear that 10 years of war (with an unprecedented number of soldiers seeing combat two, three and four times) dramatically increases the likelihood of psychological injury. I recently spoke to a Special Forces soldier who has been in Afghanistan nine times over the past 10 years. Regardless of one’s inner strength and resilience, that amount of combat exposure over such a long duration makes post-trauma symptoms almost a certainty.

The Department of Defense has a done a remarkable and admirable job of increasing access to mental health care and combating stigma, work that will change the field significantly for decades to come. Regardless, though, the warrior culture does not embrace psychological injury, with large percentages of those suffering opting not to pursue care. The net result is an increase in personal suffering, high divorce rates, escalating numbers of service members dying by suicide, and families left to grieve tragic and unnecessary losses.

All of us need to recognize and understand that even with the best trained and most effective fighting force in the history of the world, psychological injuries in combat are just as unavoidable as medical casualties. We need to fight stigma, continue to improve access to care, and help those struggling recognize that the answer is reaching out for help.

The Best Medicine Just Might Be a Job Peter D. Kramer, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University, is the author of "Listening to Prozac" and "Against Depression."

I began my psychiatry residency at a community mental health center. The director liked to put trainees in their place. He’d trade any of us, he said, for a good employment counselor. Medication and psychotherapy were fine, but they worked better if a patient had a job.

Suicide is a distinctive event, but its causes are hardly simple or single. Mental illness plays a role — mania, depression, schizophrenia and, in veterans especially, post-traumatic stress disorder. Brain injuries of the sort that are common in our current wars increase the risk of suicide by half.

As a result, mental health services are central to any program to prevent suicide. Psychotherapy and medication have been shown to help with each of the disorders that can lead to suicide. The recent report by the Center for a New American Security suggests that too few mental health professionals are available to veterans. Where staffing levels improve, suicide rates decrease.

It has been decades since I routinely treated veterans, so I hardly put myself forth as an expert, and the center's report strikes me as comprehensive. I would point only to this omission: a lack of emphasis on the need for dignified work.

Study after study correlates unemployment with suicidality. While joblessness among veterans is not uniformly high, for some groups the numbers are astronomical. Nearly 27 percent of male veterans 18 to 24 are unemployed. When soldiers leave the military, they lose what service provides: purpose, focus, achievement, responsibility and the factor the CNAS report calls “belongingness.” The workplace can be stressful, but especially for the mentally vulnerable, there is no substitute for what jobs offer in the way of structure, support and meaning.

The jobs bill working its way through Congress — which would give businesses tax credits for hiring veterans, especially those with service-related disabilities — is a step in the right direction. More broadly, for the Department of Veterans Affairs, a successful employment program would act as a mental health program. I should add that the same is true for the country in general.

The Importance of Military Families Kristy Kaufmann is the executive director of the Code of Support Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bridging the gap between civilian and military America.

As an Army wife and military family advocate, I can say with certainty that there is no single explanation for service member suicides.

I do know this: service members come with families. If you have a broken family, chances are you’re going to have a broken soldier — and vice versa. In fact, the Pentagon and Army suicide prevention reports released last year both identified relationship problems as a leading causal factor among service member suicides.

While both reports provide valuable findings and recommendations to reduce suicides among service members, neither specifically addresses the mental health of military family members, effectively ignoring half of the problem. War comes home. No soldier comes back the same, which means no family is ever the same. As a result, many military spouses and children are experiencing their own mental health issues.

Three Army wives I knew personally all took their own lives. Although we have no official numbers (which is part of the problem), we know from our own personal experiences that suicide attempts and completions among family members occur far more often than many realize or care to acknowledge. Suicide among service members, veterans and families is an indicator of the amount and duration of stress we continue to bear.

The fact is, even if everything in the Pentagon and the V.A. were working perfectly, the government simply does not have the resources — or culture, for that matter — to support the level of need after 10 years of war, and it never will.

Unless we develop a more holistic strategy to prevent suicide, one that effectively integrates military families and community support, we risk losing countless military and veteran families. Although service members make up less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of our society has a crucial role to play. This is America’s military. It will take a nation working together to keep us strong.

Challenges for Service Women Anuradha K. Bhagwati, a former captain in the Marine Corps, is the executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy organization that advances the rights of military women.

The rate of suicide among women who have served in the military is triple that of their civilian counterparts. Why is this?

Despite having been to war for the last 10 years, U.S service women still face widespread ignorance about the sacrifices they’ve made overseas. In Iraq and Afghanistan, 148 military women have died, and thousands more have returned home with post-traumatic stress and other emotional and physical wounds. As patients, women still face shortages in basic health care and grossly insufficient cultural competency at Veterans Affairs medical centers, where health providers still largely cater to the needs of men.

As veterans, women face unique reintegration challenges, including higher rates of unemployment and homelessness and lower levels of income. Women are often expected to be the primary caretakers for spouses, children and aging family members, meaning that they have less time and space to take care of themselves. One further reason we lose veterans to suicide is military sexual assault. Over 19,000 sexual assaults were committed against service women and men last year alone. Military sexual assault does not elicit the same outpouring of support as the narrative of men and women returning from war, and many sexual trauma survivors suffer in silence. Getting a V.A. claim based on sexual trauma is an enormous hurdle. In our experience, when these claims are rejected, veterans are at additional risk for suicidal thoughts. In fact, only 32 percent of post-traumatic stress disorder claims based on sexual trauma are accepted, while 53 percent of claims based on combat trauma get accepted. Not being compensated in any way for the military’s betrayal can lead many veterans on a tragic downward spiral.

Preventing suicide among veterans requires a frank conversation about the discrimination, harassment and assault many of our veterans are subjected to, as well as accountability by the institutions that allow these circumstances to continue.