Advancing Critical Military Suicide Studies: Challenging Assumptions and Innovating Prevention

Suicide among military servicemembers and veterans is a profound and persistent public health challenge, manifesting across national and cultural contexts. Despite systematic surveillance, targeted research, and significant resource allocation over the past two decades, suicide rates within military and veteran populations have increased or remained elevated in many Western countries. Historically, efforts have concentrated on the identification of risk and protective factors, the development of clinical interventions, and the implementation of broad institutional prevention strategies. While substantial advancements have been made in clinical, policy, and programmatic domains, a deep-seated paradox persists: investments in conventional prevention strategies have not consistently produced meaningful reductions in suicide deaths or been sufficiently responsive to the unique needs of the military and veteran community, highlighting gaps in our theoretical and practical approaches.This Research Topic aims to foster a critical re-examination of the foundational assumptions that shape military and veteran suicide research, policy, and prevention activities. By inviting interrogation of established paradigms and the incorporation of diverse epistemological, theoretical, and methodological approaches, the goal is to expand current approaches in ways that better capture the complexity of suicide and suicide prevention within military and veteran contexts. We hope to identify and preempt interpretive errors that impact policy and practice, such as earlier incorrect assumptions that combat experience or psychiatric diagnoses alone explain suicide or that suicide in military populations is primarily an individual clinical problem rather than a sociocultural and institutional one.Central objectives include elucidating gaps in current models; understanding the complex sociocultural and institutional dynamics influencing suicide; ensuring that military suicide studies move beyond a medical or reductionists model and toward multidimensional and systems-oriented approaches; and identifying innovative avenues for prevention that respond to the lived realities and strengths of military-affiliated populations. The Research Topic seeks to bring interdisciplinary insights to the surface, leverage lived experience, challenge persistent theory-practice gaps, and inspire new directions in suicide prevention scholarship.This Research Topic is broadly open to critical scholarship that interrogates, reimagines, or expands upon existing approaches to suicide research and prevention in military and veteran communities, including family members and dependents. We welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:• Applicability of prevailing suicide theories to military and veteran populations• Exploration of sociocultural, institutional, and policy factors impacting suicide• Broadening the spectrum for what constitutes ‘upstream’ suicide prevention• Theoretical innovations and critiques of the current paradigm in suicidology• Use of novel or underutilized data sources such as program implementation data, climate surveys, policy and regulation archives• Interdisciplinary investigations of the cultural context of suicide in military populations• Ethnographic, qualitative, or mixed methods studies of psychological or cultural dimensions of suicide (e.g., institutional ethnography, communications, discourse, phenomenology, narrative approaches)• Examinations or case studies of novel prevention and intervention efforts, particularly community-driven or non-clinical strategies• Policy analyses addressing gaps between evidence, practice, and lived experience• Intersection(s) of suicide and topics, concepts, or contributing factors, such as mental health (PTSD, depression, moral injury, substance use), leadership, training (amongst civilian or military personnel), identity, attachment, or organizational communication• Improving, adapting, or streamlining human subjects research policies, protocols, and administrative bodies• Moral injury, shame, and identity: exploring constructs beyond clinical diagnosis• Help-seeking behaviour, stigma, and institutional barriers to careThis Research Topic is open to early career and independent researchers, and writers from non-academic backgrounds (advocacy, journalism). We encourage a wide range of article types, including empirical research, literature reviews and meta-analyses, studies reporting null findings, theoretical critiques, case studies, policy analyses, and opinion or perspective pieces. Topic editors: Cooper B Hodges, Sarah Carter Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79839/advancing-critical-military-suicide-studies-challenging-assumptions-and-innovating-prevention