Background: Mental Health support to military operations is well established as an integral part of military medicine. Unfortunately, Commanders often receive little or no training in how best to use their mental health assets or what their capabilities are. Conversely, members of a Field Mental Health Team frequently have no operational experience and try to merely translate their civilian practice onto the battlefield.

Aim: This article describes what mental health professional can, and should do on military deployments and calls for greater training and awareness of both Mental Health professionals and Operational Commanders to foster mutual understanding and use the Field Mental Health Team to best effect.

Method: The paper drawson the experience of working in a Field Mental Health Team on six operational deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Results: Military mental health professionals work mostly in peacetime and this work ill prepares them for the very different type of work required of them on operations.

Conclusion: More training is required to prepare both practitioners and commanders for the mental health issues that confront them on operational deployments.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11528978PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00207640241261208DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

mental health
40
field mental
12
health team
12
health
10
mental
9
practitioners commanders
8
health professionals
8
operational deployments
8
operational
5
operational mental
4

Similar Publications

While considerable progress has been made in understanding the neuronal circuits that underlie the patterning of locomotor behaviors, less is known about the circuits that amplify motoneuron output to adjust muscle force. Here, we demonstrate that propriospinal V3 neurons (Sim1) account for ∼20% of excitatory input to motoneurons across hindlimb muscles. V3 neurons also form extensive connections among themselves and with other excitatory premotor neurons, such as V2a neurons.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Anxiety and depression disorders show high prevalence rates, and stress is a significant risk factor for both. However, studies investigating the interplay between anxiety, depression, and stress regulation in the brain are scarce. The present manuscript included 124 law students from the LawSTRESS project.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Executive functioning (EF) in referees is associated with their decision-making during a match and can be affected by mental fatigue (MF), a psychobiological state induced by prolonged periods of cognitive activity or high cognitive demand within a short timeframe. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the impact of MF on EF and the perception of effort during a physical task for football referees. Twelve male professional football referees were recruited (32 ± 7.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Seclusion is a restrictive intervention used in forensic mental health care to manage service user risk of harm. It has been associated with harmful effects for service users and consensus is that its use needs to be reduced. Research has identified that factors related to nursing staff influence the use of seclusion.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Although empirical support for the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (11th ed.; ICD-11) distinction between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD (CPTSD) is growing, research into the ICD-11 CPTSD model in prison staff is lacking. This study used latent profile analysis (LPA) to (a) determine if there are distinct groups of trauma-exposed prison governors (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!