A Canadian soldier, Bombardier Karl Manning, 31, shown in this undated handout photo, has died in a non-hostile incident in Afghanistan.DND handout/The Canadian Press
A new study says the military's overall suicide rate is no higher than that of the general population, though some soldiers and ex-soldiers are more than twice as likely to take their own lives.
The Statistics Canada study of 188,161 military personnel who enrolled between 1972 and 2006 says that women between the ages of 40 and 44 were more than twice as likely to die from suicide as their same-age counterparts in the general population.
The study says that among those released from the military during the study period, males aged 16 to 24 were more than twice as likely to kill themselves as those in the general male population.
But it found that among all those who joined the military during the study period, the risk of suicide was not significantly different from that of the general population.
The report comes just days after what appears to have been the fourth suicide by a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan.
The study period, however, predates the bulk of Canada's major combat operations in the country's Kandahar region and it does not include deaths that occurred outside Canada.