Service members are required to take annual suicide prevention training each year, so they can learn about the warning signs and mental health resources available to them. However, a new federal watchdog report found that the majority of military services do not “effectively monitor training completion” for annual suicide prevention courses, with the exception of the Air Force.
For troops that do finish the annual training, the services have also not “fully assessed” whether the courses are effective at educating troops on topics like lifestyle factors that increase suicide risk or how to seek mental health help.
“The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps offices do not regularly track required annual training completion and only the National Guard Bureau takes action to help ensure training completion,” the Government Accountability Office said in a report released Wednesday. “Addressing these issues would help the service headquarters offices ensure training and service-specific learning objectives are reaching the military community as intended.”
Suicide rates across the military have increased since 2011, Pentagon researchers found in a recent annual report.
Additionally, the Department of Defense’s office in charge of suicide prevention policy and training does not currently require that the services report this kind of information. But by requiring that the branches report this data, the department could “make informed decisions” as it oversees those programs, the GAO said.
The GAO also found that most of the services did not have plans to evaluate the effectiveness of their annual suicide prevention training. The Air Force’s plan was more thorough than the other branches, but it only met three of the 11 policy requirements for assessing the impact of the training.
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The GAO said that the Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force have some post-training surveys, but their plans don’t thoroughly look at “the extent to which expected outcomes have been achieved,” GAO said. The report said that the Navy “has not developed” a plan for evaluating its suicide prevention program’s effectiveness.
Evaluating what troops take away from the prevention training would help the branches determine if they are “achieving intended outcomes, such as recognizing risk factors for suicide.”
“Such trainings are an essential part of DoD’s broader suicide prevention program and help ensure that service members use help-seeking behaviors, have awareness of suicide risk factors, and know resources for intervention, such as referral techniques and protocols for at-risk service members,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report released Wednesday.
Military mental health advocates, Patrick and Teri Caserta, said the report emphasizes concerns they have previously raised about the importance of education and awareness. Their son, Brandon Caserta, was an active duty sailor who died by suicide in 2018 after he was repeatedly denied mental health care by his command. After his death, the Casertas lobbied for a federal law called the Brandon Act that gives troops the right to self-refer or confidentially request mental health help.
But many troops don’t know about their right to invoke the Brandon Act and get the help they need before it’s too late, Patrick Caserta said. Because of this, the parents have worked with Congress on a new bill that would require information about the Brandon Act to be included in annual training.
“The Brandon Act is federal law. It was specifically created to help remove barriers to seeking mental health care and directly addresses command response, stigma, and access to evaluations. Yet this report discusses many of the exact same issues the law was intended to help solve without mentioning it once,” Teri Caserta said. “This strengthens our concerns that awareness and implementation across DoD are still inadequate.”
In addition to the lack of oversight over mental health training across the force, the GAO also found that civilian staff cuts may impact efforts that began under the previous administration to improve suicide prevention training.
In 2022, an independent committee of suicide prevention and mental health experts formed by then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recommended that the Defense Department make changes to improve its “one-size-fits-all” approach to training, where troops sat in dark auditoriums during PowerPoint presentations. The committee suggested that the military develop courses for different audiences, deliver content in smaller groups and vary training duration and frequency.
The Defense Department estimated that implementing the committee’s recommendations would cost $163 million and require 318 additional full-time civilian personnel, according to the GAO.
But in March 2025, the military began cutting civilian positions that were not “directly tied to today’ s operational priorities,” which included a hiring freeze and deferred resignation program. Navy and Air Force officials told the GAO that the hiring freeze and workforce attrition have hindered their ability to hire more staff to implement suicide prevention training changes.
“Officials from the military departments have told us that civilian personnel changes have varied over time, and they have not yet been able to quantify impacts to suicide prevention,” the watchdog said in its report.
The agency recommended that the military improve its data collection so it can track how many troops take annual training and come up with plans for how the services evaluate their training.
In its response to the GAO, Department of Defense officials agreed to direct the services to come up with a way to evaluate the efficacy of annual suicide prevention training.
However, officials also partially disagreed with some of the GAO’s recommendations for yearly data collection, stating that “in the future, the suicide prevention training may not be annual.”
