May is Mental Health Month, and DCoE is working on a number of psychological health projects and initiatives that will help our service members and their families. Over the next year, I hope to see us make significant improvements in three areas.
Reducing stigma: The Real Warriors Campaign is going to be a very important piece in helping to reduce stigma for service members seeking psychological help. We believe that all of the components of the campaign, such as educational materials and senior military leadership sharing some of their struggles, are going to be helpful. It is OK to have issues; the question for each service member is how are you going to address those issues? To learn more about the campaign, visit www.realwarriors.net.
Better treatments: I hope that in a year from now we will have identified better treatments for psychological health issues. One promising area we are focusing on in regard to research is alternative medicine therapies such as exercise, relaxation therapy, and acupuncture. We are also working with the DoD/VA guidelines committee on developing and updating clinical practice guidelines for issues such as clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
More focus on supporting Individual Augmentees (IAs) and Global War on Terror Support Assignments (GSAs): These are service members who deploy singly, not as part of a unit. GSAs are basically IAs. However, whereas IAs leave their assigned unit to do a job at another one, they remain assigned to their parent unit and eventually return to it. A GSA on the other hand is transferred to a deployed billet, as an individual, not with a unit, and then is ordered to a different command which often knows nothing about them when they return. We know from Vietnam that service members coming back with no unit support or cohesion is a recipe for trouble.
This is especially important to me because I was an IA. I am lucky that I was assigned to a very supportive command that took good care of me and my wife. It is a lonely experience in many ways to go to a unit where you know no one and perform very stressful duties. In my case I was sent to an Army unit, so I didn’t know the culture and that’s a pretty big shock when you’re in the middle of Iraq and trying to do your job.
As Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said, “we have no higher priority in the Department of Defense, apart from the war itself, than taking care of our men and women in uniform who have been wounded, who have both visible and unseen wounds.” Our work in these three areas is an important part of both preventing those wounds, and taking care of those who receive those not necessarily visible wounds.