Pentagon Denies Increase in Troops' Suicides a Result of War

This is patently ridiculous. Some things just don't need studying. Common sense says the connection is there.

I wrote earlier about Owen Wilson's suicide attempt which was unfortunate and unsuccessful. People commit suicide when under far less stress than soldiers who are in 100°+ heat and worried about IEDs, snipers, mortars.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, I find every new report about suicides among this generation of soldiers particularly painful. So I was surprised the other day to find myself laughing out loud reading about how poor Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army Surgeon General's office, got stuck with the awful job of announcing, with a perfectly straight face and no irony whatsoever, that, although the suicide rate among soldiers has reached a 26-year record high, Pentagon studies still haven't found a connection between soldier suicides and the war.

Via AlterNet (Reuters).