When one thinks about substance use or addiction in the military, one’s mind may automatically go to alcohol. Although the prevalence of alcohol use and abuse can be considerable, we would be remiss to overlook the historical use and current trends in use of two other legally and socially sanctioned substances within our military population: tobacco and caffeine.
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. We're heading into the final week of October and Halloween!
The weekly Research Update contains the latest news, journal articles, useful links from around the web. Some of this week's topics include:
● Associations Among Childhood Trauma, Childhood Mental Disorders, and Past-Year Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Civilian Men.
● The continuum of sexual trauma: An examination of stalking and sexual assault in former US service members.
● Social Media and Suicide: A Review of Technology-Based Epidemiology and Risk Assessment.
● Gender Differences in Threat Biases: Trauma Type Matters in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.
A study of non-treatment-seeking infantry soldiers who had been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq Tobin, et al (2014) found that 44.0% reported chronic pain (pain for more than 90 days). Of those chronic pain suffers, 48.3% reported symptoms for over one year. Additionally, 15.1% of this non-treatment-seeking sample was using opioids. The comparable rates of civilian chronic pain and opioid use at the time of this study were 26.0% and 4.0%. Alarmingly, 44.1% of soldiers reporting opioid use also reported mild to no pain in the past month and 5.6% reported no pain (Tobin, et al, 2014).