A Hint of the Mental Health Problems to Come.

So far, there hasn't been a lot of good news for the US Military in recently published scientific papers this month. A few days ago, there was the JAMA paper that looked at the increase in child abuse and neglect that happens at home while a parent is deployed. Now, there's a paper in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that reports on the mental health effects of multiple and prolonged deployments.

Here are some of the findings reported in this paper:

⢠Those deployed for more than 13 months were significantly more likely to report problems at home both during and after their last deployments than those who were deployed for shorter periods.

⢠Those deployed for more than 13 months were significantly more likely to report PTSD, psychological distress, physical distress and/or exhaustion, and severe alcohol problems than those deployed for shorter periods.

⢠Those who were deployed for longer than expected were significantly more likely to report PTSD than those who came home on schedule.

⢠The authors did not, for the most part, find that multiple deployments had a significant effect on mental health problems. However, the sample size for this group was small, the authors report multiple possible confounding factors (such as differing effects between cases with many short deployments compared with many long ones), and the 95% confidence intervals were still very near the significance cutoffs.

Presuming that the British results will also apply to the US military, there's nothing here that's a big surprise, but all of it is still very alarming. At the moment, we have people in the Army who are preparing to deploy for the third, fourth, or fifth time since 2001. The upcoming deployment is going to be for 15 months, and none of the previous ones were for under 12. Mental health screening prior to (not to mention following) deployment is, as Mo's pointed out more than once, hideously inadequate at best.

Things are bad, and they're getting worse. There's no end in sight, and it looks more and more like we can only begin to imagine what the long-term consequences of this disaster are going to be.