Feelings of fear and anxiety related to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can inadvertently lead to social stigma due to lack of knowledge or misinformation about how COVID-19 spreads, a need to blame someone, and fears related to the disease and death.
Although individuals from minority populations in the U.S. experience mental illness at similar rates as white individuals, symptoms are potentially more long-lasting and disabling among minority groups due to a variety of factors. Part of this may be due to difficulty obtaining appropriate mental health care in a timely way. Primarily, the broad context of systemic racism and social barriers that members of minority groups face play a role.
In this blog, Dr. Rogers briefly reviews current literature examining the relationship between PTSD, sleep disturbances, and suicidality. Increasingly, research is examining the link between different types of sleep disturbances and their relationship with suicidality (e.g., suicidal ideation and attempts). The purpose of this blog will be to review the latest findings about the relationship between sleep disturbances and suicidality for Service members and Veterans diagnosed with PTSD.
As we close out this year's PTSD Awareness Month, we wanted to take a quick look at a few relevant stories from around the web.
I had a patient who had once been a psychiatrist and left the field to return to general medicine. He was an active duty Service member who'd had multiple deployments. I remember thinking that he had become so burned out from working with Service members around behavioral health issues and combat that he had to leave that part of the profession altogether. But even then, I realized that "burned out" did not capture what I was seeing in him