$125 million resilience "training" uses troops as guinea pigs for research

Crying first thing on a Sunday morning is not a good way to start the day but while reading this, that is exactly what happened. I had a voice in my head crying out in anguish because of "training" the Marines gave him. Back then, it was called Battle Mind. This program was supposed to help them become resilient but it did more harm than good.

He was in his early 20's, back from Iraq for a couple of months. He was sitting outside the Orlando VA clinic with a buddy as they were filling out paperwork. We were talking and suddenly, he was crying. He was sorry to be crying in front of me. He said, "Ma'am you just don't understand. I'm a Marine. We're not supposed to cry." We talked for a while more and then he told me that he thought he failed to train right, so he "got" PTSD. He believed it was his fault.

This is what Battle Mind did. It began by telling them they could train their brains to prevent it. This sent a message to them that if they ended up with PTSD, it was because they didn't do it right.

No one told him that he trained to do his job in Iraq and did it right. No on told him that he didn't lack courage because no matter what kind of pain he was in, he still did his job, watched the backs of his friends and spent every day with honor. His first concern while deployed was for his buddies. When they were all out of danger, then he allowed himself to feel the pain he carried all that time.

There is so much being done under the claim of helping when the evidence has shown more harm than good being done. Losing more after combat proves the claims fall flat but the pain is very real. This report is about how steps taken to help them are doing more harm than good. God willing someone with the authority to do something about it will stop these kinds of programs and stop sacrificing their lives so a company can make money. They are doing "research" while calling it training. In other words, the troops have been used as guinea pigs instead of being helped to heal.

The Dark Side of "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness

By Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, and Stephen Soldz Posted by Stephen Soldz (about the submitter)

Why is the world's largest organization of psychologists so aggressively promoting a new, massive, and untested military program? The APA's enthusiasm for mandatory "resilience training" for all U.S. soldiers is troubling on many counts.

The January 2011 issue of the American Psychologist, the American Psychological Association's (APA) flagship journal, is devoted entirely to 13 articles that detail and celebrate the virtues of a new U.S. Army-APA collaboration. Built around positive psychology and with key contributions from former APA president Martin Seligman and his colleagues, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for our soldiers and veterans. While these are undoubtedly worthy aspirations, the special issue is nevertheless troubling in several important respects: the authors of the articles, all of whom are involved in the CSF program, offer very little discussion of conceptual and ethical considerations; the special issue does not provide a forum for any independent critical or cautionary voices whatsoever; and through this format, the APA itself has adopted a jingoistic cheerleading stance toward a research project about which many crucial questions should be posed. We discuss these and related concerns below.

Conceptual and Empirical Concerns

Although its advocates prefer to describe Comprehensive Soldier Fitness as a training program, it is indisputably a research project of enormous size and scope, one in which a million soldiers are required to participate. Reivich, Seligman, and McBride write in one of the special issue articles, "We hypothesize that these skills will enhance soldiers' ability to handle adversity, prevent depression and anxiety, prevent PTSD, and enhance overall well-being and performance" (p. 26, emphasis added). This is the very core of the entire CSF program, yet it is merely a hypothesis -- a tentative explanation or prediction that can only be confirmed through further research.

There seems to be reluctance and inconsistency among the CSF promoters in acknowledging that CSF is "research" and therefore should entail certain protections routinely granted to those who participate in research studies. Seligman explained to the APA's Monitor on Psychology, "This is the largest study -- 1.1 million soldiers -- psychology has ever been involved in" (a "study" is a common synonym for "research project"). Butwhen asked during an NPR interview whether CSF would be "the largest-ever experiment," Brig. Gen. Cornum, who oversees the program, responded, "Well, we're not describing it as an experiment. We're describing it as training." Despite the fact that CSF is incontrovertibly a research study, standard and important questions about experimental interventions like CSF are neither asked nor answered in the special issue. This neglect is all the more troubling given that the program is so massive and expensive, and the stakes are so high.

It is also important to note here two controversial aspects of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program that have already received attention from investigative journalists. First, Mark Benjamin has raised provocative questions, not yet fully answered, about the circumstances surrounding the huge, $31 million no-bid contract awarded to Seligman ("whose work formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration's torture program") by the Department of Defense for his team's CSF involvement.

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The Dark Side of "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness

The Marine above carried more pain than he needed to carry. Aside from the fact he was brave when he needed to be and human when he didn't need to be brave anymore, no one told him that the fact he cared so much, no matter what he was going through, showed great compassion. We talked about God and how all the evil done in this world can be allowed. No one told him that when he felt compassion in the middle of all that horror, God was right there because he was. The Chaplain he talked to while deployed told him that he was not a member of the "right" faith and he needed to convert. There was no mention of God's love, how to forgive and how to be forgiven. We fail them in so many ways, I think I need to go an cry a bit more after reading this report.