Citizen or Soldier? A Blurry Balancing Act Has National Guard Reeling for Resilience.
The Army National Guard has experienced similar rates of suicide as the military’s active component, with far fewer resources and less support.
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DonateLara Salahi is an award-winning health journalist, author, and associate professor of journalism at Endicott College in Massachusetts. Through the lens of the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic, her book, Outbreak Culture, critically examines the toxic culture that emerges during outbreaks that can complicate the response to public health crises. Salahi was selected as a 2021-2022 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism fellow to report on suicide and the science of resilience in the National Guard. She is the spouse of a soldier who serves in the Army National Guard.
The Army National Guard has experienced similar rates of suicide as the military’s active component, with far fewer resources and less support.
As National Guardsmen deploy more often in response to fires, floods, storms, and civil unrest, the solution won’t come with the end of the forever wars.
As things got worse, death itself became a means of intervention: Funerals reunited buddies, and they quietly identified who could be next.