The prevalence of Psychological Disorders among Military Forces

Guaranteeing the mental health of military forces is of paramount importance given the nature of their profession. The present study aimed at investigating the prevalence of psychological disorders among the target military staff.
The design of the study was descriptive-cross sectional. The participants of the study were 1835 members of army staff. They were selected from among 11 regiments by using cluster sampling. The data was collected through a self-designed questionnaire on demographic characteristics and an SCL-90 test.
Then¡ the data was analyzed by running the descriptive statistics and analysis variance functions of SPSS software and the LSD test.
The prevalence of psychological disorders was found to be 16/3%. The highest distributions of the psychological disorders investigated in the study were respectively related to depression (16.7%)¡ obsessive- compulsive disorder (15.8%)¡ somatization (15.6%)¡ interpersonal sensitivity (15.4%)¡ anxiety (15.3)¡ psychoticism (15.3%)¡ phobic anxiety (12.6%)¡ and paranoid ideation (8.9%). Concerning the demographic variables¡ the findings of the study suggested that the more the age¡ the more the likelihood of suffering from psychological disorders would be.
Considering the outbreak rate of psychological disorders among the army staff investigated in the study¡ the importance and the delicacy of their profession¡ and the discrepancy between the results from epidemiological studies¡ it seems necessary to carry out similar studies with the same method on other army units and to have periodical check-ups in order to keep their mental health.