December is not the worst time for suicides. March and June are.
In fact, it's the lowest rate of suicide, which spikes in the spring and fall. If anything, we need to watch out for Sailors in March and June more often than December.
And, even more so, the link between suicide and deployment was rather tenuous. It's not until recently that we've seen the "multiple deployment" group have statistically higher suicide rate than others, and it may be due to the fact that everyone now has multiple deployments. Not that deployment can't add stress, but someone planning to commit suicide has lots of issues even before a deployment.
Suicide is a problem in our Navy and needs to be addressed. Sadly, we lost more personnel to suicide than to combat action last year. But let's get the myths out of the way so that we can combat it effectively. Most service members considering suicide already have significant issues from their past before you even consider what stress the military adds. We need to address that part first if we ever hope to achieve a drop in suicide rate.
Sources (and I'm sure you can add more):
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/11/11/military-suicide-rate-down-more-than-22-percent-since-last-year-defense/
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/suicide.asp
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/suicide/holiday.html
http://www.altdaily.com/features/134-comment49/2212-62army-suicide-rate-on-the-rise-or-just-a-loss-of-recruiting-standards
