Research Summaries

Back Analysis of the role of service-specific risk factors in military suicides and mental health illnesses

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Graduate School of Business & Public Policy
Department Graduate School of Business & Public Policy
Investigator(s) Cunha, Jesse
Shen, Yu-Chu
Sponsor Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (Navy)
Summary This study's long term goal is to retrospectively analyze destructive behaviors and mental health problems at the individual service member level and unit level to identify risk factors and/or the loss of protective factors at different stages of that process, as well as identifying effective prevention initiatives. The purpose of current proposal is to gain deeper understanding of whether there are unit level risk factors (i.e., peer effect) that are associated with negative personnel outcomes, such as suicide attempts, alcohol and/or drug misuse, and occurrences of costly mental health outcomes. As an exploratory analysis, we would like to
1. Investigate whether there is systematic relationship between unit’s composition (such as gender composition, MOS composition, deployment experiences, etc) and unit-level incidences of suicide attempts, substance misuse (drug and alcohol), and mood disorders (such as depression and anxiety). Depending on data availability, we also plan to investigate smoking and drinking behavior.
2. For each outcome, we would identify “high-risk” units (i.e., those that rank in the top 10 percentile of each outcome) and investigate whether certain types of units are consistently rank high across multiple mental health and suicide outcomes.
3. Investigate potential effects of peers with existing mental health conditions and substance misuse on the likelihood of an individual being diagnosed with substance misuse and/or mental health conditions.
Keywords Mental Health destructive behavior
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal