Pitching a sweeping new program to a crowded auditorium, Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum told officers that being thousands of miles away from their families in the middle of a combat zone can benefit their mental health.
Everybody knows about post-traumatic stress disorder, Cornum, one of the Army's top health officials said, but that's just one side of the story. Many men and women come back from war with enhanced leadership skills and a greater appreciation for their loved ones, she suggested. "Most people say they make better decisions, that it changed their priorities to a more mature way of looking at things," she said.
Just like PTSD, there's a diagnosis for that: Post-traumatic growth.
Cornum admitted the Army hasn't done enough to prepare soldiers for the mental rigors of a two-front war. Thousands have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering from PTSD and record numbers are committing suicide. Cornum came to Fort Leavenworth last week to sell officers on a new effort to move soldiers from PTSD to PTG.
The new programs is called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, and it's rolling out Army-wide next month. "We want to build emotional strength and try to build it with a deliberate program, not the hope method," Cornum told the Leavenworth crowd.
How you come out of an experience, she said, depends on how you go into it. The Army would never send a soldier into battle without teaching him how to shoot a gun. But soldiers get little preparation when it comes to dealing with the stress that comes with it.
"We would never do that with malaria," Cornum explained by way of comparison. "We would never send a battalion to Africa and hope they don't get malaria. We would do organizational things, like drain swamps and use bug spray. We'd do individual things like drugs and mosquito netting on beds. Then, only then, if they got malaria, we'd certainly treat it. We need to start treating psychological stress as an occupational hazard, too."
So the Army turned to Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, for a program it hopes will act as a mental-health vaccine. Seligman, like Cornum, is a prophet for post-traumatic growth. Speaking to the officers at Fort Leavenworth via video link, he suggested that the difference between PTSD and PTG is optimism.
"Optimists are people who, when they face setbacks, they see those setbacks as temporary and local; that it's just this one situation and it's changeable," he explained. Seligman suggested optimists suffer less depression and outperform their pessimistic cohorts and, more importantly, his team has cultivated techniques that can convert the psychological cynic.
The Penn Resiliency Program, he boasted, teaches participants how to battle catastrophic thinking and challenge their negative thought processes. According to his research -- largely on children -- the training reduces the incidence of depression and anxiety. Cornum for one, is a believer, calling the program "the best evaluated program I've ever seen in history of the world."
In October, that program will start trickling into Army training. It won't be a one-shot deal, like an annual safety training or even a six-month "stand down" on suicide prevention. "What it is, is a long-term, lifelong program," Cornum said. "What it is not, is a single, sit-down chain teach. Just like you can't get physically fit going to the gym once, you're not going to get psychologically fit with a one-hour lecture on anything."
She acknowledged that officers, like those in the auditorium might be skeptical. She wasn't sure she'd get anything out of it herself. "I've taken some of training," she said. "Now, I think I'm pretty resilient. I think I'm psychologically robust and socially successful. But I had the same response the NCOs [non-commissioned officers] had. They all come back and say, 'Yes, not only do we need this in Army, but I already found a way to use it in my house.'"
Seligman had an even higher expectation for the program.
"The large question is how do we make an invulnerable army; how do we make soldiers just as invulnerable as the nuclear deterrent," he said. "We think we can produce soldiers who come back from setbacks and fight one deployment after another under the persistent combat that we face in the next decade."
Comments (0)