Friday, Jul. 31, 2009

Mental health in the military

Army chief pushes for training to help soldiers handle stress

Aiming to stem a rising suicide rate among troops, the Army’s top general said Thursday during a visit to Fort Jackson that the service will launch a training program in October to teach soldiers how to better handle combat stress.

The program has been in the works for some months and soldiers at Fort Jackson, the Army’s largest basic training center, have participated in a pilot program over the summer, Gen. George Casey said.

Now the Army is ready to expand the program and teach it at every school from basic training to the Army War College, Casey said.

“Because the treadmill that we’ve been on as an Army for the last eight years and likely will be on for some years to come is such, if we don’t give soldiers these skills we’re just going to have increasing challenges,” Casey said during a news conference at the end of a two-day stay in Columbia.

On Wednesday night, Casey was the guest of honor at a reception hosted by the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce.

Casey, who served nearly 32 months in Iraq before taking the Army’s top job in 2007, said the service wasn’t doing enough to teach soldiers about mental fitness early in their military careers.

“We were heavily weighted on providing assistance and treatment after we identified the problem, and we were a little light on the preventive side,” Casey said.

The program will focus on mental, emotional, spiritual and physical fitness and family strength, the Army said. Soldiers will learn how to make the right choices that will lead to lowering stress levels.

An example offered during a briefing Casey observed centered on how a soldier might react if someone cut in front of him while waiting in line at the dining hall.

While it’s understandable for the victim to get mad and want to punch the miscreant, the session’s teacher said the wronged soldier needs to think about what might happen to him if there’s a fight.

“But does it help you get through basic combat training?” the teacher asked.

The teacher suggested that maybe other soldiers could step in to defuse the situation by either injecting humor or deflecting the victim’s attention.

“Oh, is that Pamela Anderson over there?” the teacher suggested as a possible joke to lighten the mood. The thought of a glamorous movie star waiting in line at the chow hall drew laughs from the roomful of troops.

The need for more mental health training has been evident for years as Army leaders struggle to find ways to give troops more time at home between deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the impact of repeatedly sending soldiers into combat has taken a toll, according to Army statistics.

For the first six months of the year, there were 88 reported suicides among active-duty troops, up 31 percent from a comparable period in 2008. Among the reasons officials cite for the increase are marital and financial problems, and drug and alcohol abuse.

For all of 2008, the Army recorded 128 suicides among active-duty soldiers, up from 115 in 2007.

During Thursday’s visit at Fort Jackson, Casey met with key architects of the Army’s mental fitness program and sat in on a briefing for soldiers.

Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, who survived a helicopter crash and several days of captivity during the first Iraq war in 1991, directs the program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.

“We’re taking good people and making them better,” Cornum told Casey during a meeting at a Fort Jackson dining hall.

The idea is to make soldiers more emotionally and psychologically fit, she said.

The impact of combat stress sometimes tends to be underestimated or ignored, with greater emphasis placed on treating troops for post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD.

Casey has said that not every soldier deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan suffers from PTSD, but most do experience stress.

“The core of the program is to give soldiers the skills they need to actually enhanced their performance and build resilience,” Casey said.

He said the program is designed to help troops adapt the skills they learn in the Army to their return to civilian life.

At Fort Jackson, drill sergeants probably will do the teaching in basic training, Casey said.

“This is something drill sergeants are going to have in their kit bag and when they finish shooting on the range and they’re sitting around under a tree waiting for the truck to come they can work on some of these skill sets,” Casey said.

Casey also thinks the drawdown of troops in Iraq will help because they’ll be spending about two years at home between deployments instead of the current rate of 12-15 months.

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