Mental Health of Canadian Forces Members While on Deployment to Afghanistan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The deployed environment poses special challenges to the delivery of effective in-theatre mental health care. Our study sought to identify the prevalence and impact of symptoms of mental health problems in Canadian Forces (CF) personnel serving in Task Force Afghanistan; and, to determine the use of, and perceived need for, mental health services in CF personnel while deployed. METHODS: Our study consisted of a cross-sectional survey of all 2779 CF personnel deployed to the province of Kandahar, Afghanistan, from February 15, 2010, to March 15, 2010. RESULTS: An important minority (8.5%) of the 1572 respondents (response rate = 57%) exceeded civilian criteria for symptoms of acute traumatic stress, major depression, or generalized anxiety. Prevalence of these 3 mental health problems increased with higher combat exposure and location in more isolated posts. A much larger fraction (31%) reported suffering a stress, emotional, alcohol, or family problem during the deployment. Only a minority of respondents with a mental health problem (26%) were currently interested in getting help. Almost one-half of respondents with a mental health problem perceived occupational dysfunction as a result, though two-thirds of respondents with occupational dysfunction were in the group without the 3 mental health problems assessed. CONCLUSIONS: The needs base for psychosocial support extends beyond personnel who meet conventional questionnaire criteria for traumatic stress, depression, or generalized anxiety. Future research is needed to understand what precise problems are driving this larger needs base and what precise supports (clinical or nonclinical) would be most appropriate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".