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. Like much of the East coast, we’re still recovering from last week’s historic blizzard. Despite that we’ve got lots to talk about!
The CDP's weekly research update contains the latest news, journal articles and useful links from around the web. Some of this week's topics include:
● Performance of a Portable Sleep Monitoring Device in Individuals with High Versus Low Sleep Efficiency.
● Effects of Blast Exposure on Subjective and Objective Sleep Measures in Combat Veterans with and without PTSD.
As we move through life, we accumulate experiences with death and grief, sometimes other’s grief and sometimes our own. In 2014, my twin boys died the day they were born. Their death propelled me into my own very personal experience of grief, but also heightened my awareness of other’s experiences with grief. As I began searching for topics for this blog entry I kept coming back to grief.
For nearly four decades, I had the honor of serving on the staff of the late U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, retiring in the fall of 2011 as his chief of staff. During that time, I was actively involved within the governance of the American Psychological Association (APA) and served as its President in 2000. Over the years, we have observed many changes within the field of mental health, both from the “front line” and at the all-important health policy level. Perhaps the most significant of these changes has been external to any of the mental health disciplines – it is the gradual acceptance by society of the importance and appropriateness of receiving quality mental health care, in the same manner that it is now “all right” to openly discuss receiving treatment for cancer or diabetes.
40%
The approximate percentage of active duty senior enlisted Service members (E7 and up) who are non-white, according to a recent Congressional Research Service Report -- Diversity, Inclusion, and Equal Opportunity in the Armed Services: Background and Issues for Congress (PDF).