Social Networks, Mental Health, & Suicide in the Military

Understanding the impacts of mental health and suicide in the Army remains at the forefront of issues facing senior officers and policy makers. Despite significant emphasis placed on treatment and prevention through Department of Defense systems, NGOs, and charitable organizations, leaders continue to grapple with how to appropriately address these issues and the impact to the readiness of a thinning, resource-constrained force.

I often have discussions with other Army leaders about the state of affairs surrounding mental health and suicide in the Army. A good bit of the discussion surrounds prevention and balancing mission readiness with providing Soldiers the ability to seek needed help, without the attached stigma.  In several instances, leaders posit that previous generations of Soldiers, particularly World War II veterans, were simply more resilient than Soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Surviving the Great Depression and having a clear sense of purpose on the battlefield tend to be popular ideas when describing WWII veterans’ perceived ability to deal with the effects of war. Yet, some would argue that suicide rates amongst WWII veterans are even higher than rates from the current wars, and that WWII veteran resilience didn’t mean that there weren’t catastrophic mental health consequences.

My sense is that World War II veterans were and are more resilient, but not exclusively in the ways typically described.  Soldiers in combat share a strange bond, one that transcends the key tasks and end-state of any military operation. But critical bonds are also formed in the communities that Soldiers leave behind, and my strong belief is that they serve as a safety net when those same Soldiers return. Communities help Soldiers reconnect with family, friends, and experiences that can be integral in the reintegration process.

How might a project that utilizes social network analysis tools, one that examines relationships between veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan, and World War II with their respective communities, inform approaches to stemming the impacts of mental health and suicide issues in the military? Furthermore, how might we think about approaching relevant data to assist with this type of project?

The following are mere thoughts as to how one might approach this type of project by employing social network analysis tools. Though not all-inclusive, selecting an appropriate framework, bounding the population, and gathering relevant data will provide a foundation for addressing these relationships and hopefully assist in advancing this critical field of study.

Exploring a Theoretical Framework

A blend between the Social Influence and Social Selection Network Theory frameworks advanced by Friedkin, Byrne, Robins, and others would likely serve this study well. Within the sphere of Social Influence, actors are seen as “altering their own opinions or behaviors to the group ‘norm’, which in essence is a (weighted) average of the other opinions of actors found in the network.”[i] Social Selection Network Theory examines what draws actors together.[ii]  What ‘norms’ of behavior may have differed during the WWII period as opposed to now?  How did military doctors frame the issues of mental health and suicide to the average Soldier? Was the behavior of the existing population of WWI survivors instrumental in shaping what was acceptable of returning Soldiers?

Bounding the Population & Gathering Data

Bounding the Population

Defining the population should be approached using the ‘realist’ or reputational methodology described in Christina Prell’s Social Network Analysis, which allows the actors to define the boundaries of the population. “The key aspect of the realist approach is identifying, early on, who are the key informants for your target population. You need to be confident that the informants you speak with are ones who have a good understanding of the networks in question and can offer an accurate picture of the members of this network.”[iii] In this case, the subject matter experts are the military service members. With the dwindling population of living WWII veterans, the engagement with missing actors could be replaced with discussions with family members, extracting information from letters, or analyzing community archives.

The study should further focus on collecting 3-5 sample communities per group (WWII and Iraq/Afghanistan) from varying locations around the U.S. Additionally, smaller communities with high levels of enlistment may be more valuable because the study could examine relationships not only between Soldiers and communities, but between Soldiers.

Gathering Data

1. Beyond standard service member data such as hometown, deployment information, and other administrative data, describing the service members’ family and immediate community relationships would be important for establishing a baseline for connectedness.  Prior to a combat deployment, current generations of active-duty service members are typically based away from where they grew up, whereas a majority of veterans of World War II likely returned to their hometowns. How might this affect Soldier reintegration? Certainly, current generations of Soldiers are reconnected with family and friends following a deployment, but how deeply are they rooted within the surrounding community where they are stationed?

2.  Examine types of activities or personal relationships that seemed to be shared within communities of soldiers both in 1945 and 2011. The communities would be randomly selected from relatively high concentrations of soldiers who deployed to combat. Two-mode data analysis surrounding religious activities, sports, entertainment events, etc. as well as single-mode data could be used to measure how tightly communities were bound together in 1945 versus 2011 by event and relationships.

3.  Who were the community leaders within the two groupings as identified by Soldiers? Were they religious figures, elders within the community, civic leaders, or perhaps spouses?  Utilizing directed networks and centrality measures could help uncover the sources of strength within a given community.

4. Gathering data should combine binary and valued information. Valued information, in the context of some of the WWII population, could perhaps be drawn from letters, journal entries, and discussions with family members.

Conclusion

Military leaders and policy makers must continue to place emphasis on treatment and prevention of mental health and suicide-related issues. Already, there are scores of excellent programs actively providing effective treatments and equal effort is being placed on research into new approaches to advance this work. Examining social networks of Soldiers and their communities is another tool that could provide a worthwhile contribution to ensure service members are healthy and prepared to perform their duties.

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[i] Christina Prell, Social Network Analysis: History, Theory, & Methodology (London, SAGE: 2012), 63.

[ii] Ibid. 64.

[iii] Ibid. 66.