Decorated Navy SEAL Ryan Larkin’s death was put down to mental illness, but his father — once a SEAL himself — didn’t buy it.
With four decades of government service behind him, Frank Larkin started hunting for answers after his son’s suicide. Larkin suspected his son’s military service resulted in an invisible brain injury, a kind of wound not yet known to science.
“Ryan died from his combat injuries from his service to this nation,” Frank Larkin said. “He just didn’t die right away.”
What happened to Ryan Larkin?
Ryan Larkin was 13 in September 2001 when his dad was assigned to the New York Secret Service Office, located across the street from the World Trade Center. His dad was on the ground in New York City on 9/11 and got caught in the turmoil.
“And he had witnessed that from a hillside west of the city, a town that we lived in in New Jersey. And, you know, it emotionally impacted him. I didn’t realize how much,” Frank Larkin said.
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Ryan Larkin joined the Navy out of high school and became a SEAL. He served on four combat tours: two in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.
One stretch — in Iraq, then Afghanistan with only two weeks off between — lasted about a year. Frank Larkin noticed something was wrong with his son after that deployment. Ryan had returned home from the wars to become an instructor teaching urban combat to other SEALS, a move that was considered a stepping-stone to promotion.
“He became short fused. You know, he stopped laughing, which was a key sign,” Frank Larkin said. “He became very stoic in his facial expression. I would almost characterize it as putting a mask on where at times he would get into this, you know, mode where he was almost looking right through you.”
Navy doctors scanned Ryan Larkin’s brain, but they saw no physical injury. He was in-and-out of the hospital being treated for depression and alcoholism.
“But at no point had they ever settled on a clinical diagnosis as to what was wrong with him. And it just, it just tore him apart,” Frank Larkin said. “He said to me, ‘Dad, I don’t feel like I’m in my own body.'”
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In August 2016, Ryan Larkin wrote to the Navy.
“I need help,” he wrote. “I just want to feel normal again and live a purposeful life. I loved being a SEAL.”
Ryan Larkin received an honorable discharge that year and was released from a Navy medical center with an illness no one could correctly diagnose. He told his father that if anything happened to him, he wanted his body and brain donated to science for traumatic brain injury research.
“Of course, as a father, I’m saying, ‘Hey, look. I’m here for ya. We’re, we’re gonna get through this. We’re gonna figure this out.’ I said, you, you, you know, ‘please tell me you’re not thinking about hurting yourself.’ You know, ‘No, Dad. I, I never will go that way. I’m telling you, I’ll never go that way.’ And about a month later, that’s exactly what happened,” Frank Larkin said.
It was April 2017 when Frank Larkin and his wife found their son’s body. Ryan was just 29.
“I’ve spent over 40 years of my life rescuing other people,” Frank Larkin said. “And in the end, I couldn’t rescue my own son.”
What the science shows
The Larkins donated their son’s brain to Dr. Daniel Perl at the Uniformed Services University, the military’s medical school. 60 Minutes met Dr. Perl in 2017 after his post-mortem examinations discovered microscopic scars in the brains of veterans who had taken their own lives. Depression overwhelmed them months or years after the enormous blast of a roadside bomb.
“And with the explosion comes the formation of something called the blast wave,” Perl told 60 Minutes. “And it is sufficiently powerful to pass through the skull and through the brain.”
Perl found scarring in Ryan Larkin’s brain, but there was one big difference: Ryan had not been hit by a roadside bomb. Most of what he endured was low-level, repeated shocks from his own weapons, like a large caliber rifle notorious for leaving gunners dizzy.
His job as a trainer after he returned from overseas also contributed; Students came and went, but Ryan Larkin supervised every blast, every raid, every day.
Perl found similar results in the brains of other Navy SEALS who later took their own lives.
Frank Larkin’s war: “Failure’s not an option”
Frank Larkin wanted the military to act on Dr. Perl’s findings. His four decades of government service made him skilled in the ways of Washington. After his time in the SEALs and then the Secret Service, Larkin helped run the Pentagon’s task force aimed at preventing improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq. Later, he was sergeant-at-arms for the U.S. Senate.
Frank Larkin took the evidence to old friends, then in command at the SEALS and Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
“They, to their credit, aggressively started to peel the onion on this, and started saying, ‘There’s something going on here. We’ve got to understand this,'” Larkin said.
In 2019, Special Operations launched a preliminary study to look for brain injuries from cumulative, low-level blasts. At Frank Larkin’s urging, Vice Adm. Tim Szymanski, at the time deputy commander of SOCOM, found $4 million and 30 active-duty volunteers who were suffering symptoms. Harvard professor Dr. Brian Edlow led the research at Massachusetts General Hospital. He put the troops into scanners twice as powerful as a typical MRI and discovered changes in brain structure to a region critically important because it modulates emotion and cognition.
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“They could have a broad range of symptoms that include difficulty with higher-level thinking or decision-making,” Dr. Edlow said. “They could have difficulty regulating their emotions. They could have disinhibition or difficulty controlling anger, for example.”
Another study from the University of Virginia, also commissioned by SOCOM, detected brain inflammation in special operators with prior blast exposure.
Dr. Edlow showed his findings to Special Operations in 2023. A larger, long-term study will be needed to confirm the results, but Gen. Bryan Fenton, SOCOM’S commander, isn’t waiting for more information.
“There’s a lot more questions than we have answers right now,” he said. “But all of it, if I can put it into summation, less is better in terms of exposure to blast overpressure. And we’ve got to get after that.”
Today, Special Operations Command is testing a breaching charge with half the blast pressure. Training rooms are now designed to absorb shockwaves. And they’re training with no blast at all, using augmented and virtual reality training.
Real weapons, modified for less shock, are being studied.
“We will not be ineffective with these weapons. And if we are, we won’t use that weapon. And we’ll be able to accomplish the mission and protect our force at the very same time,” Fenton said. “And also, by extension, with the work we’re doing, do that for the rest of the services.”
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The rest of the armed forces are modifying training and weapons, in part, because Frank Larkin pushed Congress to pass two laws requiring action. A new five-year study is being planned by SOCOM with 200 subjects.
These are early days. Typical MRIs can’t see the injury, so there’s no test and no diagnosis. But if this is a turning point, it is thanks, in part, to a father who believed in his son.
“And that put me on this path that I’m on right now, to try to effect change so that we have no more Ryans,” Frank Larkin said.
It’s a war of his own.
“And failure’s not an option,” he said.
If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or suicidal crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline here.
For more information about mental health care resources and support, The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) HelpLine can be reached Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. ET, at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or email info@nami.org.
Additional resources:
Suicide prevention: If you are a service member or a veteran and need someone to talk to, dial 988 and press 1.For other options, click here.
Recognizing the symptoms of blast exposure: If you are a service member, veteran or health care provider and you want to learn more about detecting the symptoms of blast exposure and traumatic brain injury, click here.
Brain health: To learn more about all aspects of the U.S. military’s program aimed at enhancing brain health, click here.
Brain donation: For service members, veterans and their relatives, if you are interested in donating your brain for research into advanced traumatic brain injury, the Defense Department has established a brain tissue repository under the guidance of Dr. Dan Perl.
