My son was stationed at Lejeune. He did 5 years and got out. His BN was sent to Okinawa right as covid hit. They were literally confined to quarters for most of 6 months and given styrofoam boxes of garbage food to eat. The only PT was in your room and or you could check out to run. After they came back, they were put in barracks that should have been condemned (my son ordered cleaning materials out of his pocket for his squad to clean the black mold best they could) with two weeks of confinement/quarantine and still strict masking/contact rules even as the rest of the world was abandoning that. They had 5 suicides in 4 months, including two who were close friends of my son. This was addressed by a couple stand down days. Pathetic. He had a high school friend who was Army who committed suicide that Summer as well. That's a lot for a 23 year old to deal with.

proud of your son and truly grateful for the young men and women who are willing to serve. It is past time the military stops treating these national heroes as commodities.

12% with suicidal thoughts. Those numbers are very troubling.

It seems a national epidemic! I NEVER remember hearing of so many in ALL walks of life. I believe most of the mass shootings are an extension of wanting to commit suicide (by cop). Difference is, those sick bastards want to take out as many as they can....compounding the tragedy of suicide into slaughtering people who have no thought of endings their lives. I guess it's a question with no simple answer, but WTF?!?

less equipped to handle life? Social media?

is that they are simultaneously connected to everyone and everything via social media, and isolated from everyone and everything via social media. It's a lot easier these days to have acquaintances than in year's past, but a lot harder to find real friends. And good relationships with people are probably the best defense against depression, anxiety, substance abuse, violence, and suicide.

We've been in our current 35 years. I've seen several different groups of kids go thru the school system, including ours 35 years ago. 5 or 6 years ago, or maybe a little earlier, I noticed that 7 or 8 kids would get off the school bus, and none of them would be walking together. They would be walking singularly, faces buried in their phones, and not one smile in sight.

The college learning and living environment can be rather tough too. Without real friends, it can be quite difficult to cope with the trials and tribulations that can manifest in an academic setting.

Some kids can handle the 💩, some can’t. Some of those who can’t deal with it go off the deep end. ** Edited by RJHokie at 4/27/2023, 9:56:18 PM

When my daughter went to college, her swim team all voted to get off social media except for team-related postings on IG. She said it's the best thing that ever happened to those girls.

gives others considering it 'permission' to do it too or something like that ** Edited by HokieDan95 at 4/27/2023, 5:07:32 PM

specifically in response to the mass shooter phenomenon. Mob mentality is definitely a thing. People will absolutely do things against their nature if others around them do it first. The new twist is how the information age plays into it. Maybe in decades past, if you were depressed and had some underlying violent or self-destructive thoughts, they just kinda simmered and never made it to the surface. But these days, you see and hear about all the people who feel the same as you, and when one does decide to lash out (at the world or themselves) it becomes very public information. At some level, you now know you aren't alone and it somehow feels more OK to feel the way you do. It also gives you the nudge to maybe act on your impulses. So it is at least somewhat true to say that every mass shooting and every suicide ever so slightly encourages the next one in a way that just wasn't true last century.

by a man on the street in full view of something like 30 witnesses that did nothing, not even calling the cops. Pyschologists did post mortem interviews with the witnesses and concluded everyone was taking their queues on what to do about the situation from others. Everyone based their own inaction on other's inaction.

But if you had a kid who was looking at colleges, would a school with an alarming suicide rate or a school with couple of mass shootings/murders in it's history be more alarming to you?

I'm not sure any school has ever had a suicide rate I would call "alarming"? The only way the murder/shooting aspect would bother me is if it were clearly a symptom of some other serious problem at the school...like a deep, venomous political divide, super-stressed race relations, etc. And similar to suicide, while each incident is "alarming" to some extent, has there every really been a "rate" overall anywhere that's alarming?

with my child that the former would be much more preventable. Now would I actually think about either in making that decision? Highly doubtful.