A new study shows the number of hospitalizations for active duty service members suffering from mental health disorders dropped to the lowest level in seven years. The report published in the April issue of the Medical Surveillance Monthly Report (MSMR) by the Defense Health Agency’s Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch (AFHSB) says just more than 15,000 warfighters in 2015 were hospitalized for treatment of mental disorders. The analysis examined several health care burdens that quantify the impacts of various illnesses and injuries among the U.S. Armed Forces and beneficiaries of the Military Health System.

“In recent years, mental disorders have had the attention of the highest levels of the U.S. military and significant resources have been employed focused on detecting, diagnosing, and treating mental disorders—especially those related to long and repeated deployments and combat stress,” said Air Force Col. Dana Dane, the chief of AFHSB’s Epidemiology and Analysis section. “It is also conceivable that the concerted efforts to decrease stigmas and to remove barriers to mental health care might have prevented the need to hospitalize service members diagnosed with these disorders.”

The report says the leading cause of hospitalizations for mental health conditions among both female and male service members were for adjustment reaction – an abnormal and excessive reaction to an identifiable life stressor such as a significant impairment in social, occupational or academic situation. The most frequent single diagnosis in males and females was adjustment reaction at 3,090 and adjustment reaction at 1,032, respectively.

Since 2008, hospitalizations for mental disorders among service members had increased by more than 50 percent but have been declining since 2013. The reason for this downturn could be attributed to several factors that include a decline in the impact of combat and peacekeeping operations since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and the steady decline in the size of the forces and combat
engagement in Afghanistan. In addition, the Department of Defense (DoD) has developed a myriad of mental health programs to break the stigma associated with the diseases and encourage service members to seek treatment. In addition, the DoD has hired more mental health professionals to provide treatment to service members to remove barriers and enhance access to mental health care that may forestall the need to hospitalize many service members because of early intervention.

Four major diagnostic categories – including mental disorders – accounted for just under 70 percent of all illness- and injury-related ambulatory visits among active component service members in 2015. Ambulatory visits for mental disorders ranked second at 18 percent followed by musculoskeletal/connective tissue disorders at nearly 31 percent. In 2015, active component service members had nearly 1.88 million ambulatory visits for mental disorders, a number remaining since 2011.

Mental disorders ranked fifth for the most frequent diagnoses during ambulatory visits for male and female service members at nearly 1.1 million and 336,205, respectively. The top conditions for males were for adjustment reaction (395,065 visits), anxiety (158,678), alcohol dependence syndrome (148,762), episodic mood disorders (110,987), and nondependent abuse of drugs (78,369).

For females, the top conditions were adjustment reaction (133,117 visits), anxiety (59,973), episodic mood disorder (52,292), depressive disorder not elsewhere classified (32,110), and alcohol dependence syndrome (18,481).