UK report tries to blame the veteran for US PTSD higher rates

Here's another theory for the UK. Maybe the UK has not diagnosed as many of their veterans but that does not mean they do not have PTSD. The 4th paragraph of this "report" is one sentence typed twice, so it was a little hard to take seriously.

The US has longer tours of duty and is expected to carry most of the load no matter how many other nations are involved in the operations. They are redeployed more with less dwell time. The list of reasons for PTSD is longer than in the UK but with all the other reports coming out of the UK, the evidence points to the lack of soldiers being diagnosed with PTSD and not the lack of PTSD in UK soldiers.

Over the years there have been many other studies boiling down to blame the veteran but this one may very well top the others.

The invisible division: US soldiers are seven times as likely as UK troops to develop post-traumatic stress
By Ethan Watters
Something is happening at the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that mental health experts are finding hard to explain: British and American soldiers appear to be having markedly different reactions to the stress of combat. In America, there has been a sharp increase in the number experiencing mental-health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Between 2006 and 2007 alone, there was a 50 per cent jump in cases of combat stress among soldiers and suicides more than doubled. Why the precipitous rise? And why hasn't there been an accompanying rise in these symptoms among British troops?

The conclusion that British soldiers appear to have a different psychological reaction to the stresses of these modern conflicts was the finding of several recent high-profile studies. This year, in a Royal Society journal, Neil Greenberg of the Academic Centre for Defence Mental Health at King's College London and colleagues reported that studies of American soldiers showed PTSD prevalence rates of in excess of 30 per cent while the rates among British troops was only four per cent. UK soldiers were more likely to abuse alcohol (13 per cent reported doing so) or experience more common mental disorders such as depression (20 per cent).

Such differences were found even when comparing soldiers who served in the most intense combat zones. In addition, while researchers found increased mental-health risk for American personnel sent on multiple deployments, no such connection was found in British soldiers.

One theory to explain these differences is that the minds of soldiers are responsive to cultural expectations of how they should feel – and that those expectations can be different from one place (or time) to another. One theory to explain these differences is that the minds of soldiers are responsive to cultural expectations of how they should feel – and that those expectations can be different from one place (or time) to another.

"Despite some claims to the contrary," Greenberg et al write, "PTSD seems not to be a 'universal stress reaction', arising in all societies across all time. Evidence from both world wars suggests that the ways in which service personnel communicate distress is culturally determined and that the development of PTSD may be one more phase in the evolving picture of human reaction to adversity."
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The invisible division