A straw poll of some two dozen serving officers at my current location revealed that while we had all come across suicides among serving and retired peers and subordinates, all of them appeared to have been linked to non-PTSD issues.

This ad hoc military judgement panel felt that the relentless focus on PTSD was obscuring a larger issue of mental health in the round and while there was awareness of some people who had suffered with PTSD, these were very much the exception; more prevalent were people with stress, depression and other mental health issues.

certainly the UK often recruits (especially the combat arms) from a strata of society where disrupted backgrounds are the norm, military life is in itself very disruptive and then on discharge we return personnel inevitably back from whence they came.