Military Service and Canadian Army Suicides of the Second World War, 1939–44
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over 230 Canadian Army soldiers took their own lives during the Second World War. For many, soldiering seems to have exacerbated stresses and depressions. Their suicide notes and the testimony of family, officers, and bunkmates reveal that wartime disturbance was an important part of the complex array of reasons why. In attempts to explain the motivations for their tragic final actions, the instabilities brought by the Second World War and the stresses of military mobilization must be added to the many biological, social, psychological, and circumstantial factors revealed by the proceedings of courts of inquiry. Major military risk factors include: access to firearms, suppression of individual agency, and disruption of the protective networks of friends and family. Some Canadians had a difficult time adjusting to military discipline and authority and were frustrated by their inability to succeed by the measures set by the army. Suicide motivations are complex and it may be too simplistic to say that the Second World War caused these deaths; however, it is not too far to say that the war was a factor in their final motivations. Some men, due to the social pressures and constructs of masculine duty, signed up for active service despite previously existing conditions which should have excused them. Revisiting these traumas can expose the difficulties that some Canadians experienced during mobilization for total war. Many brought deep personal pain with them as they entered military service and for some, the disruptions, frustrations, and anxieties of life in khaki were too great to bear. Like their better-known colleagues who died on the battlefield, they too are casualties of the Second World War.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".