Military service led to focus on suicides 

[Text on screen:
The Ohio State University
Wexner Medical Center]

Craig Bryan, PsyD: I've been interested in suicide prevention for most of my career, 

[Text on screen:
Craig Bryan, PsyD
Stress, Trauma and Resilience Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health,
Division Director of Recovery and Resilience]

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to include in graduate school, and was lucky enough to be mentored by a suicide researcher. And so, when I went into military service right after graduate school, it was something that was a professional interest. And that was about the time that the military suicide rate started to increase very rapidly. So suicide prevention became a big focus within the military. 

I deployed to Iraq in 2009, and that's where I feel like my understanding of suicide prevention really changed. We received service members who had attempted suicide, or who had died by suicide. The decedents would take care of their bodies, in the ED, keep them physically, biologically alive, so that we could return them to their families, organ donation, those sorts of things.

And really kind of coming face-to-face confronting that as a psychologist was very impactful for me. It's something that many of our healthcare providers do see on a regular basis, emergency department, trauma surgeons, things like that. But, most mental health professionals, suicide happens somewhere else, outside of the offices. It happens in people's homes and other secluded areas. 

And so we don't necessarily I think, face the brutal reality of suicide. And so, being deployed and seeing quite a lot of suicide first-hand, really I think, personalized the issue for me, helped me to, I think, understand it in not so much of an academic sense, but really on a personal level. And it really cemented my resolve and definitely solidified my commitment as this being at the forefront of my profession and my clinical interests.

There were a number of cases that I encountered in Iraq, some who had survived a suicide attempt, some who had not, where once I learned about the story, what led up to the suicide attempt, I was struck by how often there was not some of these classic risk factors. There was not depression, there was not, in some cases, even a major life stressor. And so it really defied a lot of what I understood about suicide. And it just kept happening over and over again. 

[Text on screen:
Craig Bryan, PsyD
Stress, Trauma and Resilience Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health,
Division Director of Recovery and Resilience]

And so, I started looking back in hindsight and started thinking back to some of the other cases that I had worked with over the years and said, "Maybe this understanding that we have of suicide is not complete. Maybe we're missing something."

And I think, so the work we do now at OSU, for instance, a big part of our research now is focused on firearm suicide, a very highly lethal method of suicide. And one of the things that we have been finding is that it's a very different story. It doesn't fit with some of the classic paradigms and assumptions that we have about suicide. 

And so, part of the reason I think we're not better at preventing suicide, part of the reason I think suicide rates have continuously increased for several decades, is because our assumptions about its causes and its contributors have only been one piece of the full puzzle.

[Text on screen:
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
medicine.osu.edu/mhr]

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