National Guard suicides rise, but not in NY

Suicides nearly doubled among National Guard troops nationally in 2010, but there have been none in the New York National Guard in more than two years, according to a Guard spokesman in Albany.

New York has had eight guardsmen suicides since Sept. 11, 2001, including Sgt. Denise A. Lannaman, 46, of Bayside, an Iraq War veteran, while she was stationed in Kuwait in 2006. A guardsman attached to the 258th Field Artillery, headquartered in Jamaica, Queens, killed himself in Afghanistan two years later.

"We have not had a suicide since 2008, so we don't have the spike that is reported on the national level," said Col. Curt Williamson, director of federal human resources for the New York National Guard. "One suicide in our mind is one too many."

But Lannaman's mother, Barbara Lannaman, also of Bayside, questioned whether the military is doing enough to ensure that its troops are not being pushed beyond their ability to cope.

She said her daughter had a history of suicide attempts before she enlisted in the Guard in 2003 and should never have been allowed to join.

"This is a problem, a big, big problem," said Lannaman. "There is something they are not doing.

"She was a very sick girl, but they took her anyway," Lannaman said.

Williamson, who did not comment about Lannaman's death, said the Department of Defense, not individual states, handles pre-enlistment psychological screenings through its Military Entrance Processing command.

Williamson said the New York Guard has put several anti-suicide measures in place since 2008.

Among them are mandatory pre- and post-deployment orientations, in which troops are offered psychological counseling, financial planning, family therapy and other support to help them avoid anxieties that might trigger suicide attempts.

Still, similar measures by other states' National Guards and by other branches of the military have so far failed to stem the overall rise in service member suicides.

Nationwide, 112 Army National Guard soldiers killed themselves in 2010, Maj. Gen. Raymond Carpenter, the acting director of the Army National Guard, said at a recent Pentagon briefing. Eleven were on active duty at the time.