Assessing the mental health consequences of military combat in Iraq and Afghanistan: a literature review.

Accessible summary • The deployment of British troops to Afghanistan as part of the 'war on terror', has put the Armed Forces under strain and resulted in growing pressure to address the mental health consequences among service personnel. • This paper examined lots of research papers and other articles to find out what we know about the effects of war on soldiers mental health and what help they can receive. • Themes emerging from the literature were: the mental health of current and ex-service personnel, young service personnel, responses to the mental health needs of soldiers and barriers to care. • There are higher rates of homelessness, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, relationship breakdown and criminality among former military personnel with untreated mental health problems. • Poor mental health is associated with increased risk of social exclusion on leaving the services, which further exacerbates mental health problems. An increasing number of ex-service personnel are expected to develop stress-related mental health problems in the future. The aim of this paper was to explore how a military career may affect the mental health of serving and ex-service personnel, to identify the accessibility and helpfulness of support (both during and after military service) and to make recommendations for change. A literature search was undertaken using the MetaFind meta search engine with keywords: mental health, psychological health, emotional health, soldier, British army, army, ex-army, military, military personnel, armed forces, resettlement, impact, family relationship, divorce, health, support services. The search was applied to the following databases: EBSCO Host, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Ingenta Connect, Medline, PsyArticles, PubMed, Web of Knowledge, together with the specific journals American Journal of Psychiatry, British Journal of Psychiatry and ProQuest Nursing journals. 110 relevant publications were identified and from these 61 papers were retrieved for further analysis. Poor mental health is associated with increased risk of social exclusion on leaving the services, which further exacerbates mental health problems. An increasing number of ex-service personnel are expected to develop stress-related mental health problems in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]