Are combat veterans more prone to suicide?

Article here. Excerpt:

'Are combat veterans more prone to suicide?

That’s a controversy that has heated up as the United States last year lost almost as many military personnel to suicide as to combat.

In November, the nonpartisan Congressional Quarterly reported that more active-duty military personnel committed suicide (334) in 2009 as of Nov. 24 than were killed in Afghanistan (297) or Iraq (144) that year. The Army’s active-duty suicide rate doubled from nine per 100,000 in 2001 to 20.2 per 100,000 in 2008, a number comparable with the general population. And those figures don’t take into account veterans like Jesse Huff who have been discharged from active service.
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Dr. Ethan Bean, a staff psychiatrist in the primary care clinic at the Dayton VA Medical Center, said combat soldiers may be in a higher-risk category because men are six times more likely to commit suicide than women. “A lot of veterans also possess firearms, so they have easy access to that method of suicide,” he added.

Bean said the leading indicators for suicide are depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder and substance abuse. “What we usually see when we do our research is that it’s not just one of those (factors),” Bean said. “Everything is tied together.”'