A new report says American troops in Afghanistan are suffering with the highest rates of mental health problems since 2005 and that morale has plummeted. The report, released Thursday, furnished the first detailed glimpse of the psychological cost of a campaign US commanders and officials say has reversed the momentum of the insurgency.
Military doctors said it was no surprise that morale had suffered given the dramatic increase in fighting, which they said was at the highest level since they started doing their mental health studies in 2003. "There are few stresses on the human psyche as extreme as the exposure to combat," Lieutenant General Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, said at a Pentagon news conference.
Some 70 to 80 percent of troops surveyed for the report said they had seen a buddy killed; roughly half of soldiers and 56 percent of Marines said they'd killed an enemy fighter, and about two thirds of troops said that a roadside bomb the No 1 weapon of insurgents had gone off within 55 yards of them. Those incidents were higher than what troops experienced in the previous year in Afghanistan as well as during the 2007 surge of extra troops into Iraq, the report said.
The rate of psychological problems may actually be fewer than might be expected, given the high level of combat troops are seeing, Schoomaker said. And the military said it has doubled the mental health staff in the country to help troops cope with their problems.
The data comes from a mental health team that polled more than 900 soldiers, 335 Marines and 85 mental health workers on the Afghan battlefield during last July and August, as troops surged into the country under the Obama administration's new strategy for fighting the insurgency.
The new mental health study also reaffirms the long-held view on the price paid for repeated tours of duty: mental health problems were greater for troops on their third or fourth deployment. The military says it boosted the mental health staff in the country to one for every 646 soldiers last year compared, compared to one for every 1,123 in 2009.
Only 46.5 percent of soldiers said their morale was medium, high or very high last year, compared to 65.7 percent in 2005. For Marines, it was only 58.6 percent last year compared to 70.4 percent when they were surveyed in 2006 in Iraq.
(The report compares numbers of the Marine to their time in Iraq because they were not in Afghanistan in significant numbers before the surge) Nearly 80 percent of Marines and soldiers said they'd seen a member of their unit killed or wounded, compared to roughly half who said that in the earlier years. Nearly one in five soldiers and Marines reported psychological problems.