Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms

Partners of Australian combat veterans are at an increased risk of experiencing mental health problems. The present study provides a comparative analysis of the mental health of partners of veterans with that of the Australian normative data. To compare different types of groups of partners, the stu...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors:	MacDonell, Gail V., Bhullar, Navjot, Thorsteinsson, Einar B.
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	PeerJ Inc. 2016
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5012292/

id	pubmed-5012292
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-50122922016-09-15 Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms MacDonell, Gail V. Bhullar, Navjot Thorsteinsson, Einar B. Global Health Partners of Australian combat veterans are at an increased risk of experiencing mental health problems. The present study provides a comparative analysis of the mental health of partners of veterans with that of the Australian normative data. To compare different types of groups of partners, the study samples comprised: (a) partners of Australian combat veterans (Sample 1: n = 282, age M = 60.79, SD = 5.05), (b) a sub-sample of partners of Australian combat veterans from the previous sample (Sample 2: n = 50; M = 60.06, SD = 4.80), (c) partners of Special Air Services Regiment (SASR) personnel (Sample 3: n = 40, age M = 34.39SD = 7.01), and (d) partners of current serving military (non-SASR) personnel (Sample 4: n = 38, age M = 32.37, SD = 6.20). Respondents completed measures assessing their reported levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Samples 1 and 2 comprised partners of Australian military veterans who reported significantly greater symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress than the comparative population norms. The sample of SASR personnel partners (Sample 3) reported significantly lower levels of depression and anxiety, whereas the sample with non-SASR personnel partners (Sample 4) reported a significantly greater stress symptomatology than the comparative norms. Number of deployments was found to be associated with depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of non-SASR veterans (Sample 4). Lessons and protective factors can be learnt from groups within the current military as to what may assist partners and families to maintain a better level of psychosocial health. PeerJ Inc. 2016-08-25 /pmc/articles/PMC5012292/ /pubmed/27635339 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2373 Text en ©2016 MacDonell et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	MacDonell, Gail V. Bhullar, Navjot Thorsteinsson, Einar B.
spellingShingle	MacDonell, Gail V. Bhullar, Navjot Thorsteinsson, Einar B. Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms
author_facet	MacDonell, Gail V. Bhullar, Navjot Thorsteinsson, Einar B.
author_sort	MacDonell, Gail V.
title	Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms
title_short	Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms
title_full	Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms
title_fullStr	Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms
title_full_unstemmed	Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms
title_sort	depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with australian population norms
description	Partners of Australian combat veterans are at an increased risk of experiencing mental health problems. The present study provides a comparative analysis of the mental health of partners of veterans with that of the Australian normative data. To compare different types of groups of partners, the study samples comprised: (a) partners of Australian combat veterans (Sample 1: n = 282, age M = 60.79, SD = 5.05), (b) a sub-sample of partners of Australian combat veterans from the previous sample (Sample 2: n = 50; M = 60.06, SD = 4.80), (c) partners of Special Air Services Regiment (SASR) personnel (Sample 3: n = 40, age M = 34.39SD = 7.01), and (d) partners of current serving military (non-SASR) personnel (Sample 4: n = 38, age M = 32.37, SD = 6.20). Respondents completed measures assessing their reported levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Samples 1 and 2 comprised partners of Australian military veterans who reported significantly greater symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress than the comparative population norms. The sample of SASR personnel partners (Sample 3) reported significantly lower levels of depression and anxiety, whereas the sample with non-SASR personnel partners (Sample 4) reported a significantly greater stress symptomatology than the comparative norms. Number of deployments was found to be associated with depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of non-SASR veterans (Sample 4). Lessons and protective factors can be learnt from groups within the current military as to what may assist partners and families to maintain a better level of psychosocial health.
publisher	PeerJ Inc.
publishDate	2016
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5012292/
_version_	1613644109902249984

Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms

Similar Items