30-50 percent
The percentage of injuries to Service members in the recent Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts that came from improvised explosive devices (IED), according to a new report from the RAND Corporation -- Understanding Treatment of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in the Military Health System.
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. This week we were focused on internal matters, as most of the CDP was attending our annual All-Staff meeting. We’ve come up with some great plans for the future and are excited to get back to doing what we do best! Let’s see what’s coming up.
While at officer training at beautiful Maxwell AFB, Alabama, a fellow trainee remarked at how unattractive the base was. I defended the base quickly, “Don’t you know this is actually a nice base? The color scheme includes other colors besides brown.” If you hear some righteous indignation coming through the text on this page, you would not be mistaken. For me, the familiarity of the typical brown monotone of Air Force bases, and not a particular city, was my hometown. For me, military culture was not just something I was voluntarily taking on as all Service members do in training, but something I was born into.
I have been training providers in Prolonged Exposure therapy (PE) and collecting outcome data for the past seven years. Since I arrived at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, I have been involved in the training of approximately 45 clinicians in PE and collected outcomes for over 300 cases. And while what follows is certainly not an exhaustive list of factors to consider in providing PE to a Veteran population, it does represent a convergence of my clinical observations and our empirical findings. With that stated, my findings and observations in providing PE to veterans are: 1) therapist experience matters; 2) service-connection is an important issue; and 3) not enough attention is paid to safety behaviors.
40% +
The percentage of U.S. military veterans with "a lifetime history of alcohol use disorder (AUD)," according to a forthcoming article in the journal Addiction -- The burden of alcohol use disorders in U.S. Military veterans: results from the national health and resilience in veterans study.