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The media sound bite, "more Falklands veterans have taken their own life than were killed in the war" has been in common use for about a decade. A recent report from the Ministry of Defence Defence Statistics (Health) has shown it to be incorrect-95 suicides have been recorded among Falklands veterans, whereas 237 deaths among UK Armed Forces personnel occurred during the campaign. 1 The report also found no overall increase in the suicide rate of Falklands veterans compared with the general population of the United Kingdom. So where did this false statistic come from, and why was it so misleading?
The claim that more Falklands war veterans have committed suicide than were killed in action was first made in 2002, the 20th anniversary of the war. A report in the Mail on Sunday gave a figure of 264 suicides compared with the accepted figure of 237 UK military personnel killed in action (plus 18 deaths among coalition forces). 2 The source was reported as the South Atlantic Medal Association, the principal group for UK Falkland veterans, although the association denied this. Only six months earlier the Guardian had reported a figure of around 100 suicides among Falkland veterans. 3
However, the sound bite became ubiquitous, with the figure of 264 suicides appearing consistently over a decade in a wide range of media outlets, 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 peer reviewed scientific journals, 10 online blogs, 11 12 political party conferences, 13 and even a popular trivia book. 14 Nobody seems to have pointed out that more suicides must have occurred in this group during the most recent decade. And neither has anybody mentioned that the comparison between the absolute number of suicides and those killed in action is meaningless because it does not take into account the number of suicides that would be expected in the population in general (irrespective of veteran status).
But the Falklands veterans are not alone in their falsely reported high risk of suicide. During the Vietnam war, 58220 US service personnel were killed. 15 The first time a claim was made that the number of Vietnam veteran suicides exceeded that number seems to have been in 1980, in a manual on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder....