I vividly remember when the Department of Defense (DoD) transitioned to using the DoD Suicide Event Report (DoDSER) system. I was a young Air Force psychologist stationed in Germany at the time and I remember thinking, “Oh no, one more new system to learn”. However, I now know how valuable the DoDSER program is in helping standardize suicide surveillance across the Services.
It is well-known that the prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) has dramatically increased among active duty Service members over approximately the past decade. While greater awareness and treatment-seeking, particularly as part of a medical rating, may contribute to greater diagnoses, it does not seem likely to me that those factors alone would explain a nearly six-fold increase. Which of course leads to the question: what is contributing to the rise in OSA among Service members?
Over the past few years I’ve gotten more and more questions from audience members about mobile apps that are available for Service members and their families.
Socrates believed that there are two phases to enable others in search of an understanding of their own truth. The Socratic Method is used in almost all behavioral health treatment and at its most simplistic is termed the use of open-ended questions. However, Socratic Dialogue is so much more than that – an art form that allows patients to begin the process of opening up to what is the actual truth.
Does anyone else have their fingers crossed that researchers will start finding evidence of which PTSD treatments work best with which specific patients? Happily, it seems like researchers are starting to ask those questions as well, and the recent article comparing Cognitive Processing Therapy standard protocol to Cognitive Processing Therapy - Cognitive Only may have inadvertently started to answer this question.