Few active troops report suffering from PTSD: Study
Relatively few active members of Canada’s armed forces suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, suggests a surprising new study that comes amid continuing concern about the after-effects of the Afghanistan war.
The scientists behind the analysis of federal survey data say it’s missing a key ingredient, though, and underscores the pressing need for more research.
The survey includes the responses only of active military personnel — omitting the experience of troops who have left the Forces, sometimes because their psychological troubles required them to quit.
No one has empirically studied the veteran population in Canada and, without that, it is impossible to get a complete picture of PTSD in the military, said Alain Brunet, the McGill University psychiatry professor who led the analysis.
“I am without a doubt convinced that this is an under-representation of the true state of affairs,” he said. “The only way to know how traumatic this job is, is to follow a cohort while they’re in the army, and once they leave.”
Meanwhile, the same data offers clear evidence troops suffering from PTSD are several times more likely than others to have suicidal thoughts, Brunet said.
Ruth Lanius, a leading PTSD expert at Western University in London, Ont., says other research suggests soldiers who saw combat in Afghanistan suffered higher-than-normal rates of the condition.
The analysis by Brunet and colleagues at McGill used data from a 2002 Statistics Canada survey — before the Kandahar combat mission started — but the researchers say it is the first to comprehensively track trauma exposure and PTSD in a nationally representative sample of active service people — 8,400 regular and reservist troops.
Published recently in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, it found 85 per cent had been exposed to some kind of trauma — higher than a recent estimate for the general population.
About 6.6 per cent suffered from PTSD at some point in their lives, less than the 9.2 per cent among all Canadians found in a 2014 study.
But the comparison is misleading, since those troops who retire or are forced to leave because of mental health problems are replaced by healthier recruits, skewing the military statistics, Brunet said.
Work is finally underway to conduct mental health research that looks at former soldiers who are now overseen by Veterans Affairs, as well as those still in the service, he said.
The new Liberal government recently said it would also track suicide among Veterans Affairs clients.
There is another reason surveys of soldiers serving in the military — even those done anonymously — are likely to be misleading, said Scott Maxwell of the group Wounded Warriors: military culture still discourages being open about emotional problems.
Meanwhile, Brunet’s analysis of the federal data also found a “striking” 40 per cent of female troops reported being the victims of sexual assault. That’s twice the rate other research has found in the general population.
“It’s alarming,” Brunet said. “It needs to be further investigated.”