20.8%
The percentage of adults in the U.S. who had chronic pain in 2016, according to an article in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- Prevalence of Chronic Pain and High-Impact Chronic Pain Among Adults — United States, 2016.
Welcome to this week’s edition of CDP News! We like to use this space to review recent happenings in and around the Center for Deployment Psychology, while also looking ahead to upcoming events. April is just flying by, but we've got some great opportunities ahead.
The weekly Research Update contains the latest news, journal articles, useful links from around the web. Some of this week's topics include:
● PTSD Monthly Update -- The Link Between PTSD and Substance Use
● Prospective associations between insomnia symptoms and alcohol use problems among former and current military service personnel.
● Identifying factors associated with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts following military sexual trauma.
● Resiliency factors that protect against post-deployment drug use among male US Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers.
Insomnia among Service members receives a lot of well-deserved attention, as evidenced by the need for the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) workshops CDP provides. That said, insufficient sleep or sleep deprivation is arguably more common. Data shows while approximately 20% of soldiers score above the cutoff score on an insomnia screener (Taylor et al, 2016), 69-72% of Service members obtain six hours or less sleep nightly (Mysliwiec et al, 2013; Luxton et al, 2011). In other words, only a little over a quarter of Service members get into the recommended range of 7-8 hours of sleep nightly. Personally, I would go so far as to say that even seven hours of sleep is insufficient for the majority of people based on my evaluation of sleep research.
2.5x and 2.3x
The risks, respectively, of bisexual Veterans having severe depression and PTSD relative to heterosexual Veterans, according to a recent study published in the journal Military Psychology - Mental health of the bisexual Veteran.