The Department of Defense Suicide Event Report system standardizes suicide surveillance across the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force to support the Department of Defense's suicide prevention mission.
The DoDSER tracks a variety of suicide-related risk factors and other contextual factors for suicide events that occur among U.S. service men and women. All identified suicide deaths and attempts as well as some other suicide-related behaviors (such as intentional self-harm and suicidal ideation) require DoDSER form submissions.
The DoDSER website includes instructions, detailed coding guidance, a computer-based training program, and the DoDSER form, which is used to collect the comprehensive information about suicide events among service members.
Each service conducts a professional review of records and, when appropriate, interviews family members, friends, colleagues, or the service members themselves, to collect and enter the standardized set of data. Suicide mortality data are provided by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, with inputs from the services’ suicide prevention programs.
DoDSER Annual Reports
This resource provides annual rates of suicide for each of the components (active duty, reserves, National Guard) and each of the services (Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force). The report also provides descriptive data on reported suicide deaths and attempts, including the mechanisms of injury for those events and descriptive summaries of risk and contextual factors. Beginning in 2020, all official suicide mortality rate data appeared only in the Annual Suicide Report produced by the Defense Suicide Prevention Office. DoDSER data on reported events in 2021 and future years are reported in the corresponding Annual Suicide Report.
Current and previous DoDSER Annual Reports can be viewed and downloaded below.