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Numbers matter in mental health. Politicians demand them. Service planners need them. And statistics, no matter how flawed, can shape perceptions of a particular problem.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why a new report from\u00a0the\u00a0King\u2019s Centre for Military Health Research<\/a>\u00a0is a must-read for anybody campaigning for\u00a0better support<\/strong>\u00a0for serving and ex-forces suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.<\/p>\n King\u2019s\u00a0latest study<\/a>, published last week, found that\u00a017\u00a0per cent<\/strong>\u00a0of ex-forces whose last deployment was a\u00a0combat role\u00a0in Iraq or Afghanistan would probably qualify for a PTSD diagnosis. That’s big.<\/p>\n Now, I don\u2019t take King\u2019s figures as Gospel for a number of reasons. I think many personnel may be downplaying their symptoms when they fill in the self-report questionnaires that King\u2019s uses to generate its results, so its findings are probably under-estimates. There\u2019s more to say on this. But let\u2019s leave methodology aside, and consider politics.<\/p>\n Ever since King\u2019s began its studies on the eve of the Iraq war, it has been talking about PTSD prevalence rates in the British military in single digits. The new study \u2013 with its\u00a017 per cent\u00a0<\/strong>figure \u2013 changes that. It suggests that roughly\u00a0one in six veterans<\/strong>\u00a0who left the military after a combat\u00a0deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan probably qualify for the diagnosis. For the first time, there\u2019s now an \u2018official\u2019 figure that makes PTSD sound\u00a0<\/strong>more like\u00a0a big deal,<\/strong>\u00a0and less like a problem at the margins.<\/p>\n I need to hit a pause button here to thank the King\u2019s team for being so generous with their time in explaining their research (which is funded by the Ministry of Defence) to spare me jumping to the wrong conclusions. The 17-percent finding needs to be treated with particular care. This figure\u00a0applies\u00a0to a sub-group of ex-forces whose\u00a0last deployment\u00a0<\/strong>was a combat role (a\u00a0minority of veterans). Since King’s has never been able to study this sub-group in so much detail before, it advises that you ‘absolutely cannot’ conclude that PTSD is rising significantly by\u00a0comparing the result with other studies of different groups.\u00a0That would be to fall into the \u201cfloating denominator\u201d error \u2013 otherwise known as apples and oranges.<\/p>\n It’s also tempting to chuck the 17-percent number into\u00a0some back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to figure out a rough total for the\u00a0number of ex-forces who probably have\u00a0PTSD. This is another no-no: It turns out to be a lot harder to calculate this\u00a0total\u00a0than it looks, and King’s hasn’t yet done the maths.<\/p>\n But in politics,\u00a0perception matters<\/strong>\u00a0more than statistical subtleties. I may be naive, but I suspect that it will be a lot easier to get decision-makers to listen by quoting\u00a0a PTSD prevalence figure closer to 20 per cent (albeit for a\u00a0particular<\/strong>sub-group<\/strong>) than the single-digit rates for the wider military that King\u2019s was finding while I was writing\u00a0Aftershock<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Here\u2019s an example of what I mean: Professor Sir Simon Wessely and Professor Nicola Fear, the co-directors of King\u2019s, gave evidence\u00a0to the Commons Defence Select Committee on March 27. They explained that PTSD prevalence rates for the military population\u00a0as a whole had increased from about\u00a04 per cent<\/strong>\u00a0in 2003-4 to about\u00a06 per cent<\/strong>\u00a0in 2014-15. Simon also pointed out that PTSD prevalence could be as high as\u00a09 per cent<\/strong>\u00a0in some combat units. But in general, Simon said, the rates of the disorder are\u00a0about the same<\/strong>\u00a0in the military and civilian population. He added that\u00a050 per cent of the PTSD that arises in the forces\u00a0is caused by non-operational traumatic incidents such as car accidents or assaults, rather than things that happened\u00a0on tour. I urge anyone interested in this topic to\u00a0read or watch<\/a>\u00a0the whole thing.<\/p>\n Summing up, Mark Francois MP thanked the panel for giving ‘very conclusive evidence’ that had reassured the committee that a\u00a0\u2018lazy\u2019\u00a0<\/strong>media narrative that ‘our people come out mad, bad and sad is nonsense.’ I share Mark Francois’ disdain for sensationalism. Nevertheless, I suspect that the 17-percent figure may make it harder to conclude that the\u00a0life-or-death struggles<\/a>\u00a0being fought by ex-forces with PTSD across the UK take place primarily in the imagination of journalists.<\/p>\n As I saw first-hand while writing\u00a0Aftershock,\u00a0<\/em>even those veterans and their families struggling with the most severe presentations of PTSD can experience remarkable transformations when they find the right support. Lives are lost or\u00a0ruined when they don’t. This\u00a0latest study from King’s will make\u00a0the voices of those calling for change harder to ignore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Numbers matter in mental health. Politicians demand them. Service planners need them. And statistics, no matter how flawed, can shape perceptions of a particular…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ilu4-qI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1656"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1659,"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewgreenjournalism.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}