Between 1992 and 2003, services for homeless veterans at the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System went from inappropriate utilization of hospital medical and psychiatric beds, to a continuum of residential treatment, transitional housing, and employment programs through arrangements with private agencies. The authors use elements of Hasenfeld and Brock's Political Economy Mode...

Recent studies have shown that greater social support after combat stress is associated with better psychological posttraumatic outcomes. By comparison of a group of veterans (n = 71) who sought psychiatric help and were diagnosed with PTSD (clinical group) and a group of veterans (n = 43) without PTSD (control group) we examined various components of structural and functional social support in...

OBJECTIVES To assess the risk of mortality from suicide among male veteran participants in a large population-based health survey. DESIGN AND SETTING A prospective follow-up study in the US. Data were obtained from the US National Health Interview Surveys 1986-94 and linked to the Multiple Cause of Death file (1986-97) through the National Death Index. PARTICIPANTS The sample comprised 320 ...

PURPOSE Female veterans are at high risk for sleep problems, and there is a need to provide effective treatment for this population who experience insomnia. This study's primary goal was to compare the acceptability of medication versus nonmedication treatments for insomnia among female veterans. In addition, we examined the role of patient age, severity of sleep disturbance, and psychiatric sy...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate fatigue in Australian Gulf War veterans and a military comparison group according to the 1994 chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) definition and investigate the relation with exposures. METHODS Comprehensive medical, psychological and reported exposure assessments of 1,456 veterans and 1,588 comparison group in a cross-sectional study. RESULTS More...

To evaluate the impact of race on mental health care utilization among older patients within given clinical psychiatric diagnoses, the authors examined a retrospective sample of 23,718 elderly veterans treated in Department of Veterans Affairs inpatient facilities in 1994. Significant racial differences in mental health care utilization found over a subsequent 2-year period were related to outp...

The objective of this longitudinal study was to determine psychosocial predictors of military misconduct in a cohort of Marine Corps war veterans. The study included data from 20,746 male Marines who completed a life history questionnaire during initial basic training and were subsequently deployed to a combat zone. Associations between psychosocial variables, psychiatric diagnoses, and subsequ...

BACKGROUND This article examines the long-term impact of wartime captivity. METHOD One hundred sixty-four prisoners of war (POWs) and 189 matched combatants of the 1973 Yom Kippur War filled out a series of questionnaires that assessed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), general psychiatric symptomatology, and social functioning according to DSM-III-R criteria. RESULTS Almost 2 decades af...

Depression, anxiety, irritability with unpredictable explosions of aggressive behaviour, impulsivity, suicidal actions and substance abuse have been repeatedly observed among ex-servicemen from World War II in psychiatric treatment settings. In the most recent American Psychiatric Association classification of mental disorders the category of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was introduced...

OBJECTIVES Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is estimated to affect 2% of the general U.S. population and chronic pain is a common comorbidity among persons with HCV. The primary purpose of this study was to compare health service utilization of U.S. military veterans with HCV with and without the presence of comorbid chronic pain. DESIGN Cross-sectional study with retrospective review of pat...