- Title
- Depression, anxiety, and stress in partners of Australian combat veterans and military personnel: a comparison with Australian population norms
- Creator
- MacDonell, Gail V.; Bhullar, Navjot; Thorsteinsson, Einar B.
- Relation
- PeerJ Vol. 4
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2373
- Publisher
- PeerJ INC
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2016
- 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.
- Subject
- global health; health policy; PTSD; nursing; psychiatry and psychology; public health; dyadic adjustment; combat veterans; caregiving distress; mental health; partners of veterans
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1344493
- Identifier
- uon:29433
- Identifier
- ISSN:2167-8359
- Rights
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, 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.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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