Defense launches campaign and Web site to destigmatize traumatic stress

The Defense Department launched a multimedia campaign that includes a new Web site designed to reduce the stigma that combat veterans and their families say they feel when seeking mental health care.

The effort includes the new Real Warriors Web site, which is hosted deliberately outside a military Internet domain because troops have reported that seeking help for mental health problems could harm their military careers.

The site went live on May 21 on a dot-net domain, an address where developers hope troops and their families feel it is safe to look for mental health information as opposed to looking for the same information hosted on a dot-mil domain, , said Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist who serves as director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.

Lisa Jaycox, a behavioral scientist with the RAND Corp. and one of the co-editors of the 2008 report " Invisible Wounds of War," said Defense faces a tough task when it comes to destigmatizing treatment for mental and psychological problems.

A survey RAND conducted in conjunction with its study showed that troops did not seek mental health care due to concern over "negative career repercussions," Jaycox said. "It's extremely hard to disentangle fitness for duty from seeking mental health care."

To lessen the stigma, Defense could show positive examples of people who sought help for post-traumatic stress disorder while their military careers thrived, Jaycox said.

Sutton said Real Warriors offers concrete examples of three combat veterans who candidly relate their battles with PTSD.

Army Maj. Gen. David Blackledge is one of the three profiles. Blackledge, the Army's assistant deputy chief of staff for mobilization and reserve issues, said in February he decided to talk publicly about his struggle with PTSD because he believed it was critical for senior Army leaders to discuss their experiences with combat stress.

The Defense centers designed Real Warriors to help troops and their families in a variety of ways, including anonymous, online chat sessions with mental health professionals, Sutton said.

Because many of the 1.9 million servicemen and women who have served one or more tours in Iraq or Afghanistan are young, officials decided to incorporate social media and Internet tools to reach that audience. The site's developers included buttons at the bottom of the page that users can click to access pages on Facebook, Digg, Delicious and Twitter that focus on mental health issues.

In the 24 hours after Real Warriors went online, the site had 477 visitors, more than 6,000 page views and more than 100 users signed up as Twitter followers.

Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen Romberg, a psychologist in Bethesda, Md., who in 2005 founded Give an Hour, a nonprofit that provides free mental health services to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families, hailed the launch of the site, but said the Defense multimedia outreach campaign has received little coverage in the mass media.

She said Defense should offer treatment options outside the Military Health System through organizations such as Give an Hour, whose more than 4,000 mental health professional members have provided more than 13,000 hours of service through individual and community health sessions.

"You're tough, and you go into the hospital when you receive a physical wound," Romberg said. "That doesn't mean you're weak in some way. So why wouldn't you seek treatment when you've received a psychological wound?"