Suicide Among Adults Aged 35–64 Years — United States, 1999–2010.
Which first - chicken or egg ?
Regards
Mike
Suicide Among Adults Aged 35–64 Years — United States, 1999–2010.
Which first - chicken or egg ?
Regards
Mike
Pre-broadcast publicity for tomorrow's BBC Panorama on this issue, so some UK papers have picked up the story:Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...s-suggest.htmlIn 2012 seven serving soldiers were confirmed to have killed themselves, while a further 14 died in suspected suicides but inquests had yet to be held, the Ministry of Defence have confirmed. But as the Government does not record suicides among former soldiers, the number of feared much higher.
An investigation by the BBC's Panorama found at least 29 veterans also took their own lives last year, bringing the total number of suicides to 50 compared with 40 soldiers who died in action in Afghanistan during the same period.
Link to BBC summary:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23259865
davidbfpo
How much does culture matter for P.T.S.D.? by David J. Morris
There is quite a bit of compare-and-contrast of British and American P.T.S.D. rates in the piece. Excerpts:
In [Ben Shephard’s] provocative book, “A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century,” he describes a historical cycle that governs the treatment of war stress: “the problem is at first denied, then exaggerated, then understood, and finally, forgotten.”**Shephard’s is not an original insight, but it is worth restating. One of my favorite anthropologists, W.H.R. Rivers, was publicly discussing what we now know as P.T.S.D. almost a century ago.One of the largest studies done on combat-related P.T.S.D., published in The Lancet at the height of the Iraq War, reported that around four per cent of British veterans had been diagnosed with the disorder. A meta-analysis of studies on American veterans deployed to Iraq found that the rate of P.T.S.D. diagnosis ranges from 1.4 to thirty-one per cent, although the range is typically between ten to seventeen per cent. In a 2010 study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, Neil Greenberg, of the Academic Centre for Defence Mental Health, at King’s College London, found an incidence rate of 3.4 per cent.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
'Commander Salamander' has added a commentary on the USNI blogsite, within which he comments on PTSD, alongside why service leadership fails to offer leadership:Link:http://blog.usni.org/2013/08/19/2013...28USNI+Blog%29Compared with other countries, the United States diagnoses PTSD cases at improbably high rates. Recent PTSD rates in the U.S. have reached as high as 30%, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By contrast, only 2% of Danish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan (and, per capita, the Danes have done as much fighting as anyone) are diagnosed with significant PTSD symptoms, according to a study published in December in Psychological Science. One consequence of high rates of PTSD diagnosis is that the treatment is too often conducted outside a military environment. Soldiers are deprived of what traditionally has been the best medicine: talking to other soldiers.
GBR, DNK, EST, CAN, NLD, AUS all fought relatively caveat free with us in AFG, especially DNK. That is a fair comparison. Either we argue that the average American servicemember is less hardy than your average Dane, that the Danes don’t care about their soldiers, or that there is something wrong with our reporting and classification system. I vote for #3.
davidbfpo
A straw poll of some two dozen serving officers at my current location revealed that while we had all come across suicides among serving and retired peers and subordinates, all of them appeared to have been linked to non-PTSD issues.
This ad hoc military judgement panel felt that the relentless focus on PTSD was obscuring a larger issue of mental health in the round and while there was awareness of some people who had suffered with PTSD, these were very much the exception; more prevalent were people with stress, depression and other mental health issues.
certainly the UK often recruits (especially the combat arms) from a strata of society where disrupted backgrounds are the norm, military life is in itself very disruptive and then on discharge we return personnel inevitably back from whence they came.
RR
"War is an option of difficulties"
This thread was originally called White Paper: PTSD and mTBI. It has now been renamed mTBI, PTSD and Stress (Catch All).
Today I have merged in eight similar threads, all had been closed. There remain a small number of threads on PTSD / Stress, most are in the RFI arena and have been left alone.
IHMO this thread should be viewed alongside: How soldiers deal with the job of killing:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=13523 and How LE & others deal with the job of killing and death: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=15164
davidbfpo
A short article 'When the brain is the battlefield' in The Spectator, in a health supplement:http://health.spectator.co.uk/when-t...-armed-forces/
A couple of "take away" points: 4% of all those the UK deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq come back with PTSD; 7% for those in direct combat and 40% with disorders do not seek help.
The UK public expect 90% return with physical or mental health problems.
Yes, this article was the catalyst to re-open this thread and merge smaller ones in (see above Post).
davidbfpo
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