By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Feb. 15, 2013 – As military leaders struggle to
reverse rising suicide rates within the force, Fort Bliss, Texas, is
bucking the national trend, reporting a 30-percent drop last year and
serving as a promising model for the Army and its sister services.
Fort Bliss had the lowest suicide rate in the Army during 2012 --
four confirmed and one still under investigation from its population of
33,000 soldiers. That’s down from seven in 2011.
Fort Bliss
reported three other preventable soldier deaths last year, also the
Army’s lowest rate. This came at a time suicides increased in the
overall Army and across the military as a whole, despite sweeping
initiatives across the services and the Defense Department to stem them.
So what’s the magic formula at Fort Bliss, a sprawling post in
Southwest Texas’ high desert that became the new home to the 1st Armored
Division last year?
Army Maj. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, the 1st
Armored Division and Fort Bliss commander, can’t point to any single
measure that’s making the difference. Rather, he credits a comprehensive
approach that focuses on suicide prevention, risk reduction and
resilience.
Confronted by a spate of suicides among redeploying
air defenders when he arrived at Fort Bliss in July 2010, Pittard
launched the “No Preventable Soldier Deaths” campaign. The goal, he
explained, was to prevent not only suicides, but also high-risk
behaviors that can lead to drug overdoses, motorcycle and vehicle
accidents, and other preventable fatalities.
The campaign is an
umbrella for about 32 distinct programs and initiatives. All aim to
address the root causes of suicide and high-risk behavior and create an
environment that encourages soldiers to look out for each other and seek
help when they need it, Pittard said. But the long-term focus -- one he
said ultimately will make these successes “stick” -- is on improving
soldiers’ ability to overcome adversity and to bounce back when it
strikes.
“It takes a comprehensive and holistic approach to try
to reduce preventable soldier deaths,” Pittard said. “So we have united
the resources of our entire installation -- our hospital, our fitness
program and our wellness programs -- in getting at this challenge,
together.”
“Our approach creates layer upon layer upon layer of
safety nets,” explained Army Lt. Col. Leonard Gruppo, director of the
Wellness Fusion Campus that Pittard stood up to synchronize these
efforts across the installation.
“You can imagine them as one on
top of the other, overlapping and crisscrossing with each other up into
the sky,” Gruppo said. “That way, if a soldier falls, if the first
safety net doesn’t catch him, the next one or the one after will. And in
the end, we have very few who actually hit the ground.”
One
might wonder, with so much time and energy dedicated to these programs,
how it’s impacting Fort Bliss’ core readiness mission.
“We look
at this as supporting our warfighting capability and readiness,” Pittard
said. He noted, for example, that waivers for nondeployable soldiers
have dropped dramatically.
“By making our soldiers that much more
fit and by promoting wellness and making sure they are as resilient as
they can possibly be, we are making them better combat soldiers,”
Pittard said.
But Pittard recognized from the start that creating a culture that de-stigmatizes asking for help was going to be a challenge.
So he made it an area of command emphasis, calling on leaders from across the installation to be part of the solution.
Meanwhile, he began assigning accountability for preventable deaths,
holding leaders accountable for their soldiers, and soldiers accountable
for themselves and their battle buddies.
“That is important,
because we recognize that we are accountable to the American people for
their sons and daughters that are under our charge,” he said. “Every
single life counts, and that is what we want to convey here to our
soldiers and families.”
New arrivals to Fort Bliss quickly get a
sense of this command emphasis. All get comprehensive screenings at the
Wellness Fusion Center, and redeploying soldiers receive similar,
Army-mandated screenings at the Warrior Transition Center.
The
effort, Gruppo said, helps identify high-risk soldiers but also ensures
every soldier is familiar with Fort Bliss’ array of programs to support
them.
Also, in September, Pittard made the Army’s Applied Suicide
Intervention Skills Training mandatory for all incoming soldiers at
Fort Bliss.
About 3 to 5 percent of all soldiers Armywide have
taken the two-day training, designed to help them identify signs of
distress in fellow soldiers. But at Fort Bliss, that percentage is
closer to 30 percent, and Pittard is committed to meeting the 90 percent
level by 2015.
“We are far and away from any other installation
on training people in ASIST,” Gruppo said. “We have met the Army
standard and exceeded it many times over. And we believe this is having a
big impact, as a component of the program, in reducing suicides.”
In addition, behavioral health teams from Fort Bliss’ William Beaumont
Army Medical Center serve directly with all brigade-sized units to
provide immediate support, as needed.
Meanwhile, officials at
Fort Bliss are working to promote resilience across the force: emotional
resilience, physical resilience, spiritual resilience, social
resilience, and through one of its newest initiatives, financial
resilience, Pittard said. The idea, he said, is to get “left of the
boom” -- a wartime term he said applies equally to staying ahead of
threats that haunt some soldiers after they return home, and even those
who have never deployed.
“The Army recognizes that in the long
term, giving people greater resilience skills is the way to get left of
the event, before it happens,” Gruppo said. “It’s giving people the
right skills to cope with bumps in the road of life better than they
[did], so they never get to the point where they want to kill themselves
or do something that results in an accidental death.”
To support
its long-term strategy of building resilience, Fort Bliss requires that
every unit down to company level have a certified master resilience
trainer within its ranks. Current Army policy requires one at the
battalion level, but Fort Bliss “is continuing to vigorously train
people as quickly as we can to get it down to the platoon level,” Gruppo
said.
Fort Bliss’ suicide prevention and wellness efforts
include some unexpected elements. Leaders added bike and walking paths
and gathering places, and planted more than 10,000 trees to encourage
soldiers to commune with nature and each other.
Concerned that
soldiers were spending too much time cooped up in their barracks rooms,
Pittard reintroduced the old concept of day rooms so they could hang out
together. He cut off Wi-Fi reception in the barracks so soldiers would
congregate at designated hot spots.
“The idea is to create here
at Fort Bliss this oasis -- this island of wellness for our soldiers and
families,” Pittard said. “We want it to be a place that promotes
resiliency as an installation.”
Meanwhile, he took the bold step
of allowing members of the El Paso community just outside Fort Bliss’
gates to come on post simply by showing a driver’s license.
“That
in itself has helped us not be isolated from the American people who
serve,” Pittard said. “It helped promote this feeling of communal
support among our soldiers, and the sense that they are not alone.”
Statistics indicate that the formula is working. Fort Bliss enjoyed 120
straight days without a preventable soldier death from September
through January. Other Army installations and leaders are taking notice,
and exploring ways to adopt some of the practices proving successful at
Fort Bliss.
But Pittard knows he’s far from the finish line.
Already this year, Fort Bliss has suffered two preventable deaths: a
soldier who overdosed on prescription drugs in his barracks room, and
another who wasn’t wearing his seat belt and was killed in a car crash.
And although no Fort Bliss soldiers have taken their lives in 2013, the
post still reports two or four suicide attempts every day.
“We
are not going to be satisfied until we have zero preventable deaths,
consistently,” Pittard said. “So even though we’ve made some successes,
we are a long way from where we want to be.”
Meanwhile, Pittard will continue to focus on creating a “culture of seeking help,” he said.
“We are only partially there, because cultural change takes time,” he
said. “But we have some strong efforts in that direction.”
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