Military personnel are suffering from trauma. Our basic understanding of trauma and the development of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder comes from veterans who returned from war. Ongoing research on PTSD is always focused on veterans or military personnel who are the most affected. Interestingly, connections between some of the symptoms military personnel are experiencing and the trauma of being active military aren’t often connected. Frequently, this is due to a lack of reporting. Symptoms of trauma, particularly sleep disturbances, go unnoticed because they become so regular for the people experiencing them, the symptoms no longer seem significant enough to report.
Science Daily showcases a new study which found that many military personnel are having such significant sleep disturbances that they would meet the criteria of a sleep disorder. The study was conducted by the Sleep Medicine Center at Martin Army Medical Center in Fort Benning, Georgia and published in Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
The findings of the study were significant:
31 percent of the military participants had what Science Daily called “clinically significant nightmares”“Trauma-related nightmares” were happening for 60 percent of the military participantsPTSD was five times more likely in the participants who met the criteria for nightmare disorderParticipants who met the criteria for nightmare disorder were also four times as likely to have depressionNightmare disorder qualification also created a three times likelihood of anxiety and two times likelihood of insomniaA shockingly low number of participants reported their nightmares. Only 3.9 percent total.
Nightmare disorder is extremely prevalent in trauma, the website explains. “Nightmares beginning within three months of a trauma are present in up to 80 percent of patients with PTSD, and these post-traumatic nightmares may persist throughout life.” Nightmare disorder is a diagnoses reserved for heavily repeated nightmares which have an impact on life outside of sleep, including “distress or impairment in social or occupational functioning.”
For the military personnel already suffering from PTSD or other mental health symptoms, nightmares are an unwelcome inconvenience. After chronic nightmare experiences, individuals can be exhausted, anxious, depressed, and feeling more sensitive to other mental health symptoms. If they are seeking treatment, nightmares can feel like they get in the way of progress.
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