The "total costs of caring for veterans of the post-9/11 wars" between 2001 and 2050, according to a recent report from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University -- The Long-Term Costs of United States Care for Veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
Can the stigma against seeking behavioral health treatment ever be fully banished? It's a difficult and important question. A person’s sense of self of identity depends on how they view themselves, or “who” they are instead of “what” they are physically. This distinction can make it relatively easy to seek medical treatment, but so much more threatening to ask for help from behavioral health providers. However, it takes so much more courage to analyze our internal self and admit that change may be needed.
The number of "man days" for which the National Guard was activated last year, according to a recent Washington Post article. A spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States, an advocacy organization, pointed out that this is "the highest number since World War II."
A common target for stigma-reduction interventions is to increase social support within military units with the goal of fostering support for mental-health treatment for individual service members. Recent findings from a study of Army National Guard personnel suggest that these approaches may have some unexpected and unintended consequences for treatment-seeking in Service members with service-related mental health conditions.
The percentage of "(s)ervice members who identify as LGB or who do not indicate that they identify as heterosexual" in 2018, according to a recent report by the RAND Corporation -- Sexual Assault of Sexual Minorities in the U.S. Military. And yet they accounted for "approximately 43 percent of all sexually assaulted service members in that year."