Mental health teams set to deploy with I MEF - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Mental health teams set to deploy with I MEF

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — When it returns to Iraq this winter, I Marine Expeditionary Force will bring more front-line help for its combat forces in the form of specialized mental health support teams.

These Operational Stress Control and Readiness — OSCAR — teams will deploy with a Navy psychiatrist or psychologist; hospital corpsmen trained as psychiatry technicians, currently on loan from hospitals and clinics; and perhaps a chaplain and social worker from the Navy.

OSCAR teams are part of a pilot program underway this year to establish permanently staffed teams that train and deploy overseas with each regiment and group, officials said. A request for those teams, issued by top operational commanders in a universal needs statement, is working its way through the Corps and Navy, which provides the medical and religious personnel.

“It’s been very successful, and now there’s a formal request to make it a permanent part of the Marine Corps,” said Navy Capt. Mike Maddox, the I MEF surgeon. “There is a real need ... to create a permanent structure.”

OSCAR is just one part of the Marine Corps’ Combat Operational Stress Control program, designed to expand education, training and mental health services to prevent and treat Marines’ combat stress injuries by putting those services much closer to combat troops.

“The Marine Corps is dealing with going to war, and they want the Marines to be strong, resilient, trained and educated” about stress, said Navy Capt. Dick Pusateri, the I MEF chaplain.

Officials said educating Marines and sailors and placing experts in the same training and combat environment will encourage troops to get help much sooner and not ignore stress injuries they might rather avoid.

“To have a clinician right there with them, it helps them right off,” Pusateri said.

The top commanders of the Marine Corps’ three active-duty MEFs held a conference on combat and operational stress and urged the Corps’ top leaders in a Sept. 12 letter to the commandant to fully staff and fund permanent OSCAR teams; give local unit commanders flexibility to tailor operational stress training to their needs; and update health assessments.

“Now is the time to adjust fire. We must shift the current direction of combat/operational stress control efforts to a more holistic, nested, enabling strategy that provides a sound, unified approach,” wrote then-Lt. Gen. Jim Mattis, former I MEF commander; Lt. Gen. Keith Stalder, II MEF commander; and Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, III MEF commander. “It should mirror our warrior culture, with its distinctive ethos emphasizing strength over weakness, wellness over illness, and prevention over treatment.”

Lt. Gen. Sam Helland has since taken command of I MEF.

Top commanders want the Corps to establish a combat/operational stress “continuum model” that includes formal training, education, resource tools and sustainment at every level, to include teaching Marines and sailors how to identify combat or operational stress at the lowest levels.

A small-unit leader “knows his guys better than anybody else,” said Lt. Col. Bill Swan, I MEF staff secretary, who is helping develop the program with medical experts and chaplains.

Officials acknowledge that it’s often tough convincing Marines and sailors that they need a break or a little help.

“They’re young guys. It isn’t easy for them to raise their hands,” Pusateri said. “We train them to do that about finances. We train them to do that about relationships.”

Marine Corps and medical officials are hoping to change attitudes about mental health problems.

“There will always be a stigma for mental health stuff,” said Cmdr. David Oliver, 1st Marine Division psychiatrist. “It’s much less than it was a few years before.”

“You want people to be able to handle their problems ... and be able to work through the pain,” added Oliver, who will deploy as the I MEF psychiatrist.

About 95 percent of people suffering from combat or operational stress do get better, and do so sooner when mental health services or counseling help is available, said Pusateri.

“The more we get the message out there, the more people will recover, and the better for the Marine,” he said.

With mental help support on the front lines, medical officials expect to see fewer Marines and sailors suffering from stress-related mental health issues who must be pulled from their units and evacuated out of the country. “The most important social support that they have is their squad or their unit,” Oliver noted.

So a few days of rest away from their patrol base — what the Corps calls an “operational pause” or “combat rest” — coupled with some counseling can go a long way to helping many recover, officials said.

“Most people do get better,” Oliver said. “There’s always going to be that 1 percent who has problems. If we treat it early, we probably can get a lot better outcome than if you treat it six months later.”

Locating OSCAR teams closer to units at home and overseas also helps improve communication with the local commander and reinforce the importance of getting help up and down the chain of command, Oliver said.

“We try to get out to the units and give the briefs and talk to the leadership individually and as a group and let them know that we’re there ... so we don’t have them suffer in silence,” he said.

The Corps also is looking at how to provide more mental health services to the Reserve forces that mobilize and deploy.

Unlike active-duty units, subordinate units of Reserve regiments and groups sometimes are located in different states hundreds of miles away from the headquarters. That makes placement of an OSCAR team, as well as staffing, difficult.

“Our greatest challenge is we are so geographically separated,” said Navy Capt. Rom Stevens, the 4th Marine Division surgeon. Reserve operational forces are scattered across 186 different sites, he said.

One idea circulating, is to establish a traveling OSCAR team that would support deploying battalions and squadrons, said Stevens, who will serve as the I MEF surgeon at Camp Pendleton while Maddox is deployed.