More than 400 military families traveled to a hotel on San Antonio’s River Walk this week for the 18th annual National Military Suicide Loss Survivor Seminar and Good Grief Camp, a gathering built around one shared, devastating experience: losing a loved one in the military to suicide. Among them was Olga Schultz, who lost her son Gabriel, a U.S. Navy service member, to suicide four years ago, just days before his 25th birthday.
The seminar was organized by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, known as TAPS, a nonprofit that reached out to Schultz after Gabriel died, according to San Antonio Report. Gabriel left behind his wife, Alexandria, and their 8-month-old daughter, Bernadette. Schultz later became a TAPS peer mentor herself, now working specifically with Spanish-speaking survivors, and she plans to attend the next seminar alongside her daughter Jeanne.
A Network Built on Peer Support
TAPS was founded in 1994 by Bonnie Carroll after a 1992 Alaska military plane crash killed her husband, Army Brigadier General Tom Carroll, along with seven other soldiers, according to background compiled by the organization. Carroll started the group after recognizing there was no long-term peer bereavement network across military branches for surviving families, and the model has since grown into what TAPS describes as a prevention-through-postvention approach, using survivor-to-survivor connection as a way to reduce suicide risk among the newly bereaved.
That demand has been rising. TAPS connected with 9,611 newly bereaved military and veteran survivors in 2023 alone, an average of 26 new survivors a day, marking the highest number of newly connected survivors in the organization’s 30-year history. Roughly 30% of those survivors were grieving a loss specifically to suicide…