Movember 2025: Veterans and Suicide

A crisis among young male veterans, especially

Nov 11, 2025

First, a Movember fundraising update:

Movember 2025 Fundraiser

Thanks to the donors!

Here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:

Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at Movember itself
My Movember Facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you

And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:

While prostate cancer was my initial impetus for supporting Movember, I support all of Movember’s causes, which includes men’s mental health and suicide prevention.

In particular, on this veteran’s day, I will note the problem of veteran suicide, especially in recent years.

Warning: Heavy Stuff Ahead

This one will be bleak — this is your warning. My suicide-related posts are not happy ones.

I am annoyed at the most recent VA report on Veterans and Suicide, because I find it misleading about the trends.

The trends are bad. There was a slight improvement in 2022, but the long-term trends are such that the slight improvement of 2022 was not enough to do much.

Young Veterans and Suicide: A Crisis

Last year, I ran a post based on a VA strategy report on U.S. veteran suicide, which had been published in 2018:

Mortality with Meep

Movember 2024: Veterans and Suicide

Mary Pat Campbell

November 12, 2024

First, a Movember 2024 fundraising update. As I have been asking for donations to Movember in the memory of late husband Stuart (the STU of STUMP), I have blown past prior year's fundraising:

Read full story

The VA has an annual report on Veteran suicide, last published in December 2024:

19 Dec 2024, Veterans Affairs: VA releases 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report

The 2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report analyzes Veteran suicide data from 2001 to 2022, with 2022 being the most recent year for which data is available.
Our top clinical priority is preventing Veteran suicide. We use evidence-based research and suicide analytics as the foundation for our programs and initiatives. Our richest data related to Veteran suicide comes from our annual report.
Suicide Prevention Annual Report key findings
The report contains the most comprehensive data about Veteran suicide mortality to date. Key report findings include:
In 2022, there were 6,407 suicides among Veterans and 41,484 among non-Veteran U.S. adults.
Among all U.S. adults in 2022, there were, on average, 131.2 suicides per day, with 17.6 Veteran suicides per day.
On average, seven suicides per day were among Veterans who received Veterans Health Administration (VHA) care in 2021 or 2022, and 10.6 were among other Veterans.
Anchors of hope
Hope serves an important role within suicide prevention efforts. Within the challenges faced in 2022, key areas of hope emerged, including, but not limited to the following:
Better one-year change rates.
From 2021 to 2022, age-adjusted suicide rates for female Veterans decreased 24.1%, while for female non-Veteran U.S. adults, rates increased 5.2%.
For male Veterans, age-adjusted suicide rates increased 1.6%, while for male non-Veteran U.S. adults, rates increased 1.8%.
Substantial declines in suicide among female Veterans: As mentioned above, female Veterans saw a remarkable 24.1% decrease in age-adjusted suicide rates.

The facts above are true… and misleading.

In what way is it useful to tell people how many Veterans die by suicide per day compared to non-veterans?

Let’s look at some better comparisons, and I will be focusing on male Veteran suicides in particular. I have two reasons:

Male suicide rates are so much higher than female rates (I will be doing another suicide-related post for Movember later in the month. Here is a Podcast episode from June where I discuss this.)
The number of female deaths by suicide, especially for certain age groups, are so low that I find the statistics misleading. They’re very volatile, so they can crow about a large decrease in the rates… I think it’s painting a misleading picture.

There are far more male Veterans and male Veteran suicides.

Ratio Trends by Age

All of the following graphs come from the detailed results in the report.

Rate Ratio of Suicide Deaths of Male Veterans vs. Non-Veterans by Age Group

In the above graph, we’re seeing the ratio of the death rates by suicide for each age group for male Veterans vs. non-Veterans.

If the rate ratio is greater than one, that means the Veterans have a higher suicide rate than the non-Veterans.

There is a helpful dotted line to show where it is worse for Veterans.

Basically, all male Veterans under the age of 55, from the years 2001-2022, have worse suicide rates than non-Veterans of the same age groups.

Those over age 75 have lower suicide rates, and for those aged 55-74, the relative ratio has been getting worse.

That’s just the relative risk, as it were. If you’ve seen what I’ve written about men and suicide (and I’ll be updating that), you’d know that the trend has been bad there….

Suicide Rate by Age Group, Male Veterans

Yikes.

That age 18-34 trend is awful.

I got very annoyed at the various bullet points highlighted in various summaries: rates decreased for the 18-34 age group!

Well, sure, it decreased, but that age group is quite a bit higher than all the other age groups in its rates for the last decade.

The small decrease in rate doesn’t seem to do much.

Interlude: Siegfried Sassoon, “Suicide In The Trenches”

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Sassoon was a poet who came out of World War I, and had brutal poems such as this one.

Unlike many of his subjects, Sassoon managed to live to an old age.

It’s easy to be dismissive: “It’s not as bad as trench warfare in The Great War!” but something is going terribly wrong here.

Recommendations?

I looked at the various recommendations in this high-level review document, some of which seem reasonable:

But it’s not clear that a lot of the recommendations are going to do much, given there are items like this:

Some of the recommendations address the problems mentioned above, and of course, many of the men who die do not visit the VHA in the year before they die.

But for those who do, it looks like a lot of health problems are involved here: physical pain, sleep issues, and increased health problems. None of the suicide prevention recommendations address any of those problems.

The thing is… they can’t say “maybe we’re not going to be able to do much about your pain or sleep issues.”

Even if the VHA were tops at healthcare, there is a limit to what they can do.

…. and do they really want to mix their message about suicide prevention with … something else… when the doctors can’t do much about the pain or the sleep. That’s problematic, isn’t it.