After years of war and multiple deployments, our nation's soldiers are feeling the pressure. Over the last decade, our military has seen an increase in physical and mental impairment; bodily injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and an increased suicide rate (Lessing 2012).
The military have come to realize and is trying to address these problems by increasing the mental health professionals in the army (Thompson 2010). A variety of new suicide prevention initiatives counseling programs have been established at bases and VA hospitals all around the United States (Lessing). The Army has formulating a new Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program geared to, according to the army to develop a balance, healthy and self-confident soldier.
The comprehensive Solider Fitness program is a thirty-one million dollar program developed by Martin Seligman and organized by General Rhonda Cornum (Evans 2009). The program is aim to strengthen the emotional, psychological and also controversial spiritual resilience of each soldier in the army. It is implemented as preventative measure to address certain emotional and mental disorder that can occur on the front lines of war. The Comprehensive Soldier Fitness has three main parts; first is Global Assessment Tool (GAT), which is a web, based survey measuring the psychological fitness such as soldiers, emotional, social, spiritual, and family fitness. The second is an optional Comprehensive resilience module and lastly is Resilience Training which personnel are required to undergo group workshops in which soldiers are taught various cognitive skills to build mental toughness (Lessing 2012).
Although the army is trying to find proactive solutions to its mental health problems, the Comprehensive Soldiers Fitness program comes with criticism. The program was first developed and has been tested on civilians (Goldstein). Which mostly were teenage students that were battling depression, drug and alcoholic abuse.
