By Patricia Kime
The Veterans Affairs Department expects to have data this summer that could erase the questionable statistic that 22 veterans die by suicide each day.
Dr. Maureen McCarthy, a VA assistant deputy undersecretary, told the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee on Thursday that the department has received statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and the Defense Department that should provide VA a clearer picture of the number of suicides among veterans.
VA analysts are poring over death records for all personnel who served from 1979 to 2015, according to McCarthy.
“This is very different from what we did in the past when we had to get data from the states, and some states gave us data and some did not. We are really excited because … [this data] crosses ages and sex and all other risk factors we want to be able to identify,” McCarthy said.
But the number-crunching and confirmations are taking time, she added.
“We so wanted to have this information to you by this hearing. We don’t,” she said.
The “22 veterans a day commit suicide” statistic, widely used by veterans service organizations, the media and others, comes from a 2012 report produced by the VA that extrapolated an estimate from data provided by 21 states from 1999 to 2011.
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