Peer-based intervention for acute stress reaction: adaptations by five militaries.

Military service members need to be able to operate under conditions of extreme stress to ensure the success of their team's mission; however, an acute stress reaction (ASR) can compromise team safety and effectiveness by rendering an individual unable to function. Building on an intervention originally developed by the Israel Defense Forces, several countries have developed, tested, and disseminated a peer-based intervention to help service members manage acute stress in others. This paper reviews how five countries (Canada, Germany, Norway, the UK and the USA) adjusted the protocol to fit their organisational culture while retaining essential elements of the original procedure, suggesting there can be interoperability and mutual intelligibility in the management of ASR by military allies. Future research should examine the parameters of effectiveness for this intervention, the impact of intervention on long-term trajectories, and individual differences in managing ASR.

Burdens on emergency responders after a terrorist attack in Berlin.

Background: Terrorist attacks induce various responses in emergency responders. Addressing this range of responses in individual workers is of central interest. Aims: To assess the gender- and occupation-specific effects of a terrorist attack, particularly in emergency responders. Methods: This was a pilot study. Emergency responders present during the 2016 terrorist attack at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin were asked to participate. Measures for crisis management had been previously implemented. Stress (Patient Health Questionnaire [PHQ]), quality of life (The World Health Organization Quality of Life [WHOQOL-BREF]), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 [PCL-5]) and current psychological symptoms (Brief Symptom Inventory [BSI]) were assessed. Results: Thirty-seven subjects were included, 11 female and 26 male. The occupational groups included 16 firefighters, six police officers, five psychosocial health care personnel and nine members of aid organizations. Three months after the attack, female workers showed higher scores in stress and paranoid ideation, police officers showed higher scores in hostility and firefighters scored lower quality of life in environment and physical health. Conclusions: The mental health burden identified in this study plays an important role for emergency responders after terrorist attacks. Differences between occupational groups may be attributable to differences in tasks that responders perform during acute incidents. The presence of these differences 3 months after the incident suggests that these are at least medium-term conditions. This study may inform the development of treatments and policies and it thus recommended to develop a multi-level assessment and treatment programme that is gender- and occupation-specific.

Military deployment correlates with smaller prefrontal gray matter volume and psychological symptoms in a subclinical population.

Research investigating the effects of trauma exposure on brain structure and function in adults has mainly focused on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), whereas trauma-exposed individuals without a clinical diagnoses often serve as controls. However, this assumes a dichotomy between clinical and subclinical populations that may not be supported at the neural level. In the current study we investigate whether the effects of repeated or long-term stress exposure on brain structure in a subclinical sample are similar to previous PTSD neuroimaging findings. We assessed 27 combat trauma-exposed individuals by means of whole-brain voxel-based morphometry on 3 T magnetic resonance imaging scans and identified a negative association between duration of military deployment and gray matter volumes in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We also found a negative relationship between deployment-related gray matter volumes and psychological symptoms, but not between military deployment and psychological symptoms. To our knowledge, this is the first whole-brain analysis showing that longer military deployment is associated with smaller regional brain volumes in combat-exposed individuals without PTSD. Notably, the observed gray matter associations resemble those previously identified in PTSD populations, and concern regions involved in emotional regulation and fear extinction. These findings question the current dichotomy between clinical and subclinical populations in PTSD neuroimaging research. Instead, neural correlates of both stress exposure and PTSD symptomatology may be more meaningfully investigated at a continuous level.

European military mental health research: benefits of collaboration.

Despite joint participation in international military operations, few collaborative military mental health research projects have been undertaken by European countries. From a common perspective of military mental health researchers from Germany and the UK, the lack of shared research might be related not only to the use of different languages but also the different ways in which the two militaries provide mental health and medical support to operations and differences in military institutions. One area that is suitable for military health research collaboration within UK and German forces is mental health and well-being among military personnel. This could include the study of resilience factors, the prevention of mental disorder, mental health awareness, stigma reduction and the treatment of mental disorder. Military mental health research topics, interests and the studies that have been conducted to date in the UK and Germany have considerable overlap and commonality of purpose. To undertake the investigation of the long-term consequences of operational deployment, the specific burdens placed on military families and to further the understanding of the role of factors such as biomarkers for use in military mental health research, it seems advisable to forge international research alliances across European nations, which would allow for researchers to draw transcultural and generalisable conclusions from their work. Such an enterprise is probably worthwhile given the shared research interests of Germany and the UK and the common perspectives on military mental health in particular.