Battleland

A Marine OSCAR For Best Supporting Role

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A couple of Navy doctors deployed to Helmand Province in Afghanistan with the Marines there spoke via long-distance to Pentagon reporters Thursday about the steps they are taking to tend to their troops’ mental-health needs. They emphasized their expanding and embedded nature of tending to Marine minds to make sure they remain healthy. In the brutal mental-health desert that our troops have found themselves in since 9/11, it’s nice to come upon even a small oasis where you can find, and sip, even a small draught of success.

It’s all part of the Operational Stress Control and Readiness Program — OSCAR — that for the past two years has dispatched psychiatrists and psychologists with Marine units. “What they do is actually live with the troops, train with the troops and get out in the field with them,” explained Cmdr. Charles Benson, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force shrink. “It kind of breaks down the barriers and allows them to become very effective in their jobs delivering mental health care.”

Now the Marines are going further, launching the OSCAR Extender Program, which gives medical officers, corpsmen, chaplains and even sergeants and 1st sergeants some rudimentary training in mental-health care. That lets them apply it to Marines needing it at the tip of the spear where a psychiatrist or psychologist is rarely found.

“Those folks are constantly monitoring their Marines, helping them with simple issues, and also understanding at what point they need to be referred back for higher care,” Benson said. “These two programs, I think, have generated quite a bit of success out here in Afghanistan — we’re enjoying a pretty low utilization rate of mental health resources…most issues are being taken care of far forward,” he added. “They really don’t end up becoming a psychiatric case, per se.”

This is the first deployment in which the dual OSCARs have been utilized. “As far as I understand, the Army doesn’t have a program that’s similar,” Benson noted. “We think it’s doing very well, and we’ll have to see whether or not the other services are interested in duplicating what we feel is our success.”

Army officials say they are constantly learning from the other services, just like the other services learn from the Army. The Army deploys similar combat stress control units with its combat forces, they note. While the Marines may train their sergeants as mental-health aides, the Army has fewer but better trained “mental health techs” in that job. “The Marine culture doesn’t like mental health,” a veteran Army mental-health worker says, “so therefore they think it’s better if done by the sergeant rather than done by the wizard.” In some military quarters, it seems, psychiatrists are known as wizards “because once you visit them, you disappear — you’re evacuated out of theater.”