Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a psychologist, so I won't comment on the _why_, but veterans have an extremely high suicide rate. http://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=2427 (the PDF link has the data) > Of the 147,763 suicides reported in 21 states, 27,062 (18.3%) > were identified as having history of U.S. military service > on death certificates This article has some discussion on how this data is hard to collect: http://www…
That's interesting, but what's puzzling me the most is how less people commit suicide during a war.
During a war everyone huddles together trying to survive, and social and familial ties could become strong enough that even the thought of suicide would seem offensive, as if one were abandoning friends and family to their own luck. And when you have people running around shouting orders, bullets flying and bombs falling there's simply not enough time to think about anything else.
What people seem to dread being is left to themselves, not their conditions. Which is why only reason why war has ever had any defenders, aside from bureaucrats: it gives "purpose" to men.
Recently enough, Ars ran an article on a study (10.1126/science.1250830), which I'm not sure how appropriate is to the discussion of suicide, but sums up this point quite well:
In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.