Study Finds Mental Resilience In Deployed Combat Troops

This is why the crap of telling them to train their brains to be "tough" does not work. They already are tough!

Texas A M Study Finds Mental Resilience In Deployed Combat Troops
July 20, 2011 Featured Topics No Comments

COLLEGE STATION, July 20, 2011 — Deployed soldiers in units that are facing high-risk combat situations show extraordinary tolerance for their stressful environment, found a Texas A&M University study published in the scholarly journal Psychological Assessment.

Even more remarkable, adds psychology professor Leslie Morey, is the study reveals that deployed troops have nearly identical reports of potential emotional or psychological problems when compared to their civilian counterparts back in the U.S., a finding that may point to potential adaptive mechanisms in place to sustain deployed troops that are not present once they return stateside.

Morey, who specializes in diagnosis and assessment of mental disorders, began collaborating with the U.S. Army after the Army began studying the potential development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and cognitive problems in deployed troops who had suffered from combat-related concussions. Army researchers were using the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), a widely used measurement created by Morey in 1991, to compare troops within the same unit who had received concussions and those who had not. In first analyzing the data, Morey was surprised to see that the responses of the control group — soldiers who had not received concussions but were selected to represent the typical effects of combat stresses — were remarkably normal. This realization led to an important additional focus for the study.

“Nobody had ever done a comprehensive study of the psychological effects of being in a combat unit, attempting to distinguish what might be PTSD versus what is the normative response in these situations,” Morey says.

“British troops appear to have much less lower PTSD rates than U.S. troops,” he says. “The British keep each returning unit intact and have them go through a sort of decompression out of the combat zone before they return to the UK. When you’re in the field and something happens to the unit, everyone experiences it. There is a sense of collective experience that becomes normalized, but then you return stateside to a group that doesn’t have those same experiences. The answer may lie in better handling that transition.”

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Texas AM Study Finds Mental Resilience In Deployed Combat Troops

The last part could explain why National Guards and Reservists are coming in with higher rates of PTSD as well.