Tracy Stecker, a Dartmouth Medical School professor, recently examined the attitudes among military veterans towards mental health treatment. In her report, Stecker sought to qualify the behavior of soldiers returning from the Iraq War.
In the Veterans Administration health care system, nearly a quarter of recently-admitted patients have reported experiencing mental health problems. These problems are particularly severe among soldiers returning from Iraq, who are more likely to meet the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety, than those returning from Afghanistan and other regions of deployment.
According to Stecker, however, many of the returning veterans who suffer from these disorders fail to initiate treatment. Stecker’s report sought to determine the specific factors that influence the decision to seek help.
The study was organized around the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). TPB has been used in the past to explain and predict behaviors such as donating blood or using illegal drugs. According to the theory, the decision to engage in any behavior can ultimately be traced to an individual’s beliefs about the behavior in question.
In this particular study, the behavior at hand was the initiation of mental health treatment within one year after returning from the Iraq War. Stecker and her team attempted to identity certain beliefs that can predict the intention to engage in treatment, as well as the actual initiation of treatment, among veterans of the Iraq War.
The 150 veterans who comprised the sample group were asked to respond to three questions assessing their intention to obtain treatment. At a three-month follow-up, the respondents were asked whether they had actually sought treatment for mental health concerns.
In addition, they were asked to respond to items assessing the strength of behavioral beliefs. These included statements such as: treatment will reduce my symptoms, going to treatment will hurt my work career, people will think I’m crazy if I go to treatment, and several others.
The results of the study indicate a large gap in the treatment of mental health problems among veterans. In fact, only 35% of participants in the study had consulted a specialist about their symptoms.
Stecker found that specific beliefs about mental health treatment differentiated between those seeking treatment and others who did not. Interestingly, those who reported that treatment would negatively impact their work were actually more likely to engage in treatment.
Although this may seem counterintuitive, it simply points to a potential limitation in the methodology of the experiment. Namely, the assessment was conducted after veterans had been home for at least one year. In that time span, veterans who sought out treatment may have encountered unanticipated consequences to their work.
Ideally, a study would assess the beliefs of veterans soon after their return from deployment, prior to treatment. Nevertheless, the results of this study do suggest that mental health treatment needs to address certain preconceived beliefs.