Deployment Psychology Blog

As we head into a month of Staff Perspective blogs focusing on the stigma around mental health, I struggled to come up with an angle that had not been addressed, either in previous blogs by CDP staff or in a myriad of other venues. The construct of stigma around mental health is well researched and many have written on the root of the stigma, why the military may be particularly plagued by stigma and potential directions to go in reduction efforts. 

Once upon a time, in the post-disco 1980’s, Madonna was singing about material girls and Vincent Felitti was trying to figure out why so many people were prematurely dropping out of his weight loss program at Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Preventative Medicine in San Diego. The weight loss clinic was a state-of-the-art program designed to help those who were 100 to 600 pounds overweight. Inexplicably, many were dropping out even though they had successfully been losing weight.