Mental health teams embedding to fight stress - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Mental health teams embedding to fight stress

The Marine Corps is sending more mental health teams to the front lines in hopes of better treating an emotionally strained force.

Operational Stress Control and Readiness, or OSCAR, teams will soon be assembled at the battalion and company level, putting mental health support services much closer to combat troops, according to Marine Administrative message 667/09, signed Nov. 23.

These teams include mental health professionals such as Navy psychiatrists and corpsmen trained as psychiatry technicians. They were requested by operational commanders and have served previously as part of a pilot program to train and deploy mental health professionals with Marine regiments and groups. Embedding mental health support down to the company level will make it easier for Marines, especially those leery of seeking help, to get the services they may need, officials said.

Through prevention, early identification and intervention with stress-related problems, OSCAR teams will help “keep Marines and sailors in the fight,” according to the message.

The program creates full-time billets within Marine divisions and infantry regiments, positions that will be filled by psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, mental health clinical nurse practitioners and psychiatric technician corpsmen on loan from naval hospitals.

The teams also will include battalion and company personnel, such as chaplains. They’ll work with Marines on identifying combat stress and developing techniques to relieve it.

The program also creates OSCAR senior mentors — infantry and company executive officers and senior enlisted Marines — who will oversee battalion staffing and training. Enlisted Marines and officers will be selected to serve as peer mentors, working directly with Marines on the front lines.

New OSCAR personnel initially will be trained by a Marine Corps Headquarters mobile team. Training will last about one week. Those with battalions currently preparing to deploy will be trained first. The Corps plans to have all OSCAR personnel, those within active and reserve divisions, trained by March.

Teams will be fully manned by fiscal 2011. Until then, the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery will fill teams for deploying units with mental health personnel on an ad hoc basis.