The number of veteran suicides in 2020, according to the 2022 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention. This was 343 fewer than in 2019.
The weekly Research Update contains the latest news, journal articles, useful links from around the web. Some of this week's topics include:
● What we talk about when we talk about trauma: Content overlap and heterogeneity in the assessment of trauma exposure.
● A meta-analysis of the association between shame and dissociation.
● Posttraumatic stress disorder–related anhedonia as a predictor of psychosocial functional impairment among United States veterans.
Military families continue to increase in diversity, a fact that is not always well-studied or represented in research studies and the resources and policies that they influence. This blog shares information from a recent review of research studies that examined how military families are defined and represented in mental health and substance abuse research.
The weekly Research Update contains the latest news, journal articles, useful links from around the web. Some of this week's topics include:
● Aggression in Military Members With Mild Traumatic Brain Injury and Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder Is Associated With Intimate Partner Health-Related Quality of Life.
● Relationship-undermining statements by psychotherapists with clients who present with marital or couple problems.
● Drug use over time among never-deployed US Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers: The longitudinal effects of non-deployment emotions and sex.
Alcohol use disorder within families is a topic with potential impact across subpopulations and is not specific to the population of military families. In fact, although reviews of research suggest that there may be a higher incidence of problematic drinking in some segments (but not all) of the military, the highest rates of problematic drinking seem to be observed in military populations that are inconsistent with military families with children (as factors related to higher rates include those who are single and do not have children; Osborne et al., 2022). Even more explicitly, I’m not aware of any studies which have noted a heightened prevalence of problematic drinking in military families with children versus civilian families with children.