Psychological health of Australian veterans of the 1991 Gulf War: an assessment using the SF-12, GHQ-12 and PCL-S

Abstract

Background. Elevated rates of psychological morbidity and symptomatology have been widely reported in 1991 Gulf War veterans. The present study used brief self-report instruments to compare the psychological health of Australian Gulf War veterans with that of a randomly sampled military comparison group.

War zone stress without direct combat: The Australian naval experience of the Gulf War

“…The youngest veterans also were most likely to report coming under actual attack. These findings may be relevant to previous military research which has identified younger age at time of deployment as a risk factor for PTSD (Brewin et al, 2000) and lower rank as a risk factor for psychological ill health (Ismail et al, 2000;McKenzie et al, 2004).…”

“…The methods presented in this article are part of a larger study investigating a wide range of health outcomes and exposures; these are more fully described elsewhere Kelsall et al, 2004;McKenzie et al, 2004).…”

“…They also were allocated to one of three rank categories according to their highest rank at the time of the Gulf War: officer, other rank-supervisory, and other rank-nonsupervisory . Age (Brewin, Andrews, & Valentine, 2000) and rank (Ismail et al, 2000;McKenzie et al, 2004) have been demonstrated to be associated with psychological health in veterans. Further, participants were categorized according to the time of their Gulf War deployment in relation to the air and ground warfare; these categories were pre-air war (those veterans who had departed the Gulf region prior to the start of the air warfare on January 17, 1991), during warfare (those who were in the Gulf region at some time during the air or ground warfare between January 17 and February 28, 1991), and after cease-fire (those who first arrived after the cease-fire on February 28, 1991).…”

Is the increased reporting of symptomatic ill health in Gulf War veterans related to how one asks the question?

“…This is intriguing because several questionnaire-based studies [21][22][23][24][25][26] have suggested such a difference, although the GW itself was not traumatic for the majority of the coalition forces, and certainly not in the context of other major armed conflicts. Unlike the situation after, for example, Vietnam, the media representations of the consequences of the service in the Gulf have tended to focus on possible environmental, as opposed to psychological/ traumatic, hazards in their reporting of the consequences of the GW.…”

Impact of comorbid depression on quality of life in male combat Veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder

“…The measure produces two summary scores, the SF-12 Physical Component Summary (PCS) and the SF-12 Mental Component Summary (MCS), which respectively assess the degree to which physical health and mental health problems have interfered with role functioning. The SF-12 has good reliability and validity [41] and has been used in military samples [42].…”