Giving Compass' Take:

• RAND Corporation examines the increasing suicide rate in U.S. to see if there are any patterns that can be extrapolated, specifically by comparing it to smaller populations. The Army's suicide rate started to rise in 2005, but comparisons can often confuse the issue.

• How can funders help to develop a more complete picture of suicide? What factors need to be considered when assessing suicide rates? 

• Learn how one nonprofit trying to reduce suicide-by-pesticide rates in Asia.

As the national suicide rate continues to rise, an increasing number of stakeholders — including local governments, educators, and employers — are looking within their own communities and asking: “Do we have a suicide problem?” It's a difficult question to answer. Some institutions don't have adequate systems for tracking suicides. A company, for example, may keep track of the number of employees who died, but not the cause of death.

If they do have the data, however, the actual question they often may ask is: “How does our suicide rate compare to others?”

The response I usually give is: “Which others?”

In a report my RAND colleagues and I produced in 2011, we compared the Army's suicide rate to that of the United States. Historically, the Army's rate had been roughly equal to that of the U.S. population, and in 2005 it started to rise above the national rate. But we knew that such a comparison, while it wasn't comparing apples to oranges, was like comparing two different types of apples: Golden Delicious to Gala.

We knew the two groups were very different, especially with respect to gender and age.

While the U.S. population is pretty evenly split between men and women, the Army is comprised mostly of men. The youngest soldier is 17, and very few are over age 50. Why do these differences matter? In the United States, the rate of suicide among men is four times the rate among women, and the rate for men increases as they get older.

An epidemiologic strategy called “adjusting” helped us correct for these differences and let us make a more “Gala to Gala” comparison. In doing so, we found that the Army suicide rate was historically lower than a comparable civilian population, and that in 2005 it started to rise to meet it.

Same data, different story.

But is the story complete?

Read the full article about the perils of comparing suicide rates among different populations by Rajeev Ramchand at RAND Corporation.