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Help from the Palm of Your Hand: Mobile Mental Health Support

Filed under Technology by Carla Voorhees on September 12, 2011 at 10:41 am {no comments}

This article was originally posted by Robyn Mincher, DCoE Strategic Communications, on the DCoE blog.

A smartphone is no longer used as just a way to call home. A service member or veteran can access mobile applications and websites that feature resources and programs to cope with psychological health concerns, and help one self-monitor behaviors and emotions. A service member can also receive one-on-one help over the phone with service-endorsed call centers that can put them in touch with a psychological health professional to mitigate serious concerns, like suicidal thoughts.

Crisis call centers such as the Veterans Crisis Line, Military OneSource and the Wounded Soldier and Family Hotline (800-984-8523) immediately connect those in need with psychological health care professionals.

A U.S. Army paratrooper takes a picture with his cell phone while waiting to board an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Sharilyn Wells)

The U.S. Army Family, Morale and Recreation (MWR) program offers all of the resources available on its website with Mobile MWR for the iPhone. The application features the MWR video archive with videos highlighting suicide prevention. (more…)

Guest Blog: Serving Those Who Serve

Filed under Life Sciences by Carla Voorhees on August 29, 2011 at 1:11 pm {no comments}

Doc Bender on top of the Ziggurat of Ur in Southern Iraq, in February 2009.

Dr. James Bender is a former Army psychologist who deployed to Iraq as the brigade psychologist for the 1st Cavalry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Hood, Texas. During his deployment, he traveled through Southern Iraq, from Basra to Baghdad. He writes a monthly post for the DCoE Blog on psychological health concerns related to deployment and being in the military.

It was an action-packed week recently as I was in Washington, D.C., for the American Psychological Association (APA) annual convention. I joined about 12,000 fellow psychologists to discuss a variety of topics, including the psychological health of service members and programs highlighting our latest research.

I presented at the workshop, Serving Those Who Served: Partnering with Returning Veterans to Aid Transitions, which was a forum for psychologists to become aware of information, resources and techniques to use when assisting this increasing population. As we know, military and civilian psychologists have an important role: as troops return from deployment, many will seek their help to cope with issues that may arise upon their return home. (more…)

Guest Blog: Doc Bender Writes About Responding to Stress

Filed under Life Sciences by Julie Weckerlein on August 4, 2011 at 9:15 am {no comments}

Doc Bender on top of the Ziggurat of Ur in Southern Iraq, in February 2009. (DCoE photo)

I’m sometimes asked about how the brain responds when exposed to stressful situations, like being in combat or intense training. Think about that first Airborne jump or testing for military combatives. Your brain has one main reaction to stress, whether that stress comes from being shot at during a combat deployment, asking someone out on a date, or any other situation where you’re scared or anxious. Knowing how the human brain responds to stress is helpful for military training. Not only is it good to understand how your brain operates under intense conditions, but also understanding the importance of physical fitness and psychological fitness in your ability to handle all aspects of a demanding mission is important.

One of the first parts of your brain to be affected by stress is the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is the “smart” part of your brain that plans tasks, predicts outcomes, controls behavior and directs attention. Unfortunately, the PFC generally shuts down during intense stress, impairing these functions. Under stress, you stop paying attention to parts of your environment that are most relevant to completing your goals and start paying attention to things that are loud, brightly colored or moving, but not necessarily helpful in achieving your mission. In a firefight, you might pay very close attention to the pop of a weapon but completely miss a small alley that can lead to an escape.

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Breathe to Relax with Breathe2Relax

Filed under Technology by Julie Weckerlein on June 21, 2011 at 3:20 pm {no comments}

Spc. Gordon Welch, a Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Special Troops Battalion, 7th Sustainment Brigade personnel security detachment medic, takes a breath after delivering a casualty to the Kandahar Airfield hospital, Afghanistan, March 18. Photo by Staff Sgt. Alexander Burnett

One of the worst parts of a stressful situation is feeling your body start to rev up, knowing all along that remaining calm would help you deal with the situation more effectively. Nobody likes feeling out of control in a crisis.

Now there’s an app for that.

Enter Breathe2Relax; the newest smartphone app developed at the National Center for Telehealth and Technology (T2).

Breathe2Relax teaches you how to use diaphragmatic breathing to relax; a skill taught to induce a calming response in widely different circumstances including the treatment of PTSD and panic attacks, smoking cessation, yoga, child birth, meditation and sniper training.

You’ve probably heard your mother say, “Just take a deep breath.” when you were distressed or upset. This advice has been around forever, and it turns out she was almost right. Taking a series of breaths can indeed have a calming effect, but it has to be the right kind of breath. Take the wrong kind of breath and you’ll end up feeling dizzy and disoriented from hyperventilation instead of calm, relaxed and focused.

Diaphragmatic breathing, sometimes called “belly breathing”, is the right kind of breath to help turn off your stress response and allow your body to relax. It’s different from shallow chest breathing which can easily lead to hyperventilation. When you breathe deeply using your diaphragm, you are able to fully fill your lungs with the least effort. You take control of your breathing so that you are inhaling and exhaling in a slow and deliberate way. The act of focusing on your breathing, having control over it, and using your diaphragm to draw breath into your lungs rather than force it, all lead to a calming response.

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MoodTracker: a mobile app for monitoring psychological health

Filed under Social Sciences, Technology by Armed with Science on August 11, 2010 at 10:37 am {7 comments}

The Apps for the Army (A4A) competition recently announced the winners for their first internal applications-development challenge, and DCoE’s National Center for Telehealth and Technology (T2) won gold in the morale, welfare and recreation category for their Telehealth Mood Tracker mobile application.

“We want to accommodate the military’s psychological health needs with 21st century technologies,” said Dr. Greg Gahm, director of T2. “Creating tools for wellness requires a working commitment between the psychologists and the technology specialists. I am proud of the T2 team for their accomplishment in the Apps for the Army challenge and their desire to support the military community with innovative and adaptive technologies.”

T2 MoodTracker allows service members to track their moods. Users can self-monitor their mood variations daily, weekly, monthly or even from hour to hour, which helps service members understand the impact of stress and common emotional reactions that follow a deployment.

Service members track their moods on a touch screen using a visual analogue scale which allows users to choose a point on a color continuum to reflect their current emotions, such as feelings of sadness, depression, anxiety or stress.

The application also has the capacity to store information which is helpful for service members who want to be able to share their information with a health care provider.

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Frontline Psych with Doc Bender: Studying Prolonged Exposure Therapy

Filed under Life Sciences, Social Sciences, Technology by John Ohab on June 27, 2010 at 3:33 pm {6 comments}

Doc Bender on top of the Ziggurat of Ur in Southern Iraq, in February 2009. (Photo: DCOE)

Dr. James Bender recently returned from Iraq after spending 12 months as the brigade psychologist for the 4-1 CAV out of Ft Hood. He served for four and a half years in the Army. During his deployment, he traveled through Southern Iraq, from Basra to Baghdad and many spots in between. He writes a monthly post for the DCoE Blog on mental health issues related to deployment and being in the military.

In a post for DoD Live last month, I covered resilience and actions you can take to enhance your psychological fitness. This month I’m covering how technology is being used to help treat service members who have a psychological health issue.

If you’ve spent a bit of time reading the DCoE Blog or our website, you’ve heard of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This anxiety disorder occurs in some people who have experienced an intense trauma, like combat. PTSD can be very debilitating and can last many years.

Prolonged Exposure therapy is a treatment for PTSD that has proved very successful in the past few years. The idea is to expose the patient to what originally caused the trauma in a controlled way where the patient is in charge of the situation. For example, say a soldier becomes very nervous when he hears gunfire because it reminds him of a sniper attack he experienced in Iraq. Part of treating him with Prolonged Exposure therapy would be exposing him to gunfire in a safe, controlled way, such as going to the rifle range and listening to the “pop” sound the rounds make.

When conducting Prolonged Exposure therapy, it is important that the exposure is both realistic and controlled. It can be difficult to accomplish this when the original trauma happened in Iraq or Afghanistan — are you going to send the soldier back to Iraq, into an ambush, just to treat his PTSD? This isn’t very practical, not to mention the complete lack of control in that situation.

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Help from the Palm of Your Hand: Mobile Mental Health Support

Guest Blog: Serving Those Who Serve

Guest Blog: Doc Bender Writes About Responding to Stress

Breathe to Relax with Breathe2Relax

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