Suicide is a major public health problem among Korean military personnel. As multiple factors and their interactions are related to suicide, multicomponent intervention might be useful for reducing suicide and suicide-related outcomes. The United States Air Force Suicide Prevention Program (AFSPP) launched in 1996 is a good example of an evidence-based multifaceted program focusing on leadership involvement and whole community-level efforts. For early identification and management of an at-risk population, AFSPP aims to encourage help-seeking and reduce stigma by changing the community's social norms regarding mental health and suicide. The present study reviewed the key elements of this successful intervention and made a proposal for improving the suicide prevention strategy in the Korean armed forces. This review might be useful for establishing a comprehensive intervention in local communities and organizations outside of the military.
Arm* ; Humans ; Leadership ; Mental Health ; Military Personnel ; Military Psychiatry ; Public Health ; Social Norms ; Suicide* ; United States

OBJECTIVE: Recently, an increasing number of Korean male conscripts have been retiring because of military maladjustment despite the presence of qualifying medical and psychological screening tests in the Korean army. These problems suggest the presence of a common personality problem. To further examine this possibility, the present study used Cloninger's psychobiological model to investigate the temperament and character of soldiers suffering from military maladjustment. METHODS: Seventy-nine maladjusted male conscripts and eighty-seven controls enrolled at the 1596th unit from April 2011 to June 2012 participated in the present study. To measure participant personality, we used the Korean version of the Temperament and Character Inventory, Revised-Short. We used logistic regression analysis to examine the association between TCI-RS scores and risk of military maladjustment. RESULTS: The maladjustment group had a lower rank, socioeconomic status, education level, and a shorter duration of military service than the control group. The harm avoidance and self-transcendence scores were significantly higher in the maladjustment group, with lower scores for reward dependence, persistence, self-directedness, and cooperativeness scores. However, of these measures, only low cooperativeness was associated with an increased risk of military maladjustment. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that a low level of cooperativeness can predict military inadequacy. Maladjusted male conscripts may have different personality characteristics from normals. To validate our results, further follow-up or cohort studies with a larger sample will be required.
Cohort Studies ; Humans ; Logistic Models ; Male ; Mass Screening ; Military Personnel ; Military Psychiatry ; Reward ; Social Class ; Stress, Psychological ; Temperament

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to investigate the risk factors in veterans for posttraumatic stress disorder and to find the correlation between the disorder and the characteristics of the variables. METHODS: We compared the risk factors in veterans between 40 diagnosed PTSD patients and 78 controls, using psychiatric by psychiatrists and measurement instruments such as CES, Mississippi scale, and BDI RESULTS: 1) There was statistically significant difference in prevalence on pre-military factor with regard to age at recruit(p<0.05) 2) PTSD on military factor was closely correlated with CES score(p<0.05) 3) There was statistically significant difference in PTSD on post-military factor with regard to occupation(p<0.05) 4) Scores of Mississippi scale, and BDI in PTSD were higher than those in control subjects(p<0.05, p<0.05) CONCLUSION: This results suggest that the likehood of developing PTSD in veterans depends on pre-military and post-military factors in addition to features of the trauma itself. Age of entry into the military, CES score, and occupation had statistically significant relationships with PTSD.
Humans ; Military Personnel ; Mississippi ; Occupations ; Prevalence ; Psychiatry ; Risk Factors* ; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic* ; Veterans*

Professor Charles I. McLaren (1882-1957) was an Australian Christian missionary and a professor of psychiatry in Korea. As the first psychiatrist from a Western country, he accomplished tremendous achievements in clinical, teaching and writing activities as well as in his missionary work. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1906 and, after residency training under Professor Dr. Sir Richard Stawell at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, he and his wife came to Korea in 1911. He practised medicine at Margaret Whitecross Paton Memorial Hospital in Chinju, Korea and later was appointed as a professor of psychiatry at the Severance Union Medical School in Seoul, Korea. He left Korea for a while to participate in WWII as a military doctor and he also once traveled to Vienna to learn new skills, including fever therapy and psychoanalysis. Because of his love for the Korean people, Dr. McLaren not only introduced into Korean society modern Western psychiatry and a humanitarian approach to patients with mental disorders, but he also practised medicine according to his own unique medical philosophy drawn from Christian spirituality and he educated Korean native students in psychiatry and Christianity. He and his wife also made efforts to improve old customs in Korean society. Because he argued against Japan's enforcement of emperor-worship, he had to resign from the Severance Medical College in 1939, and he returned to Chinju. Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, he was arrested, imprisoned, interned, and subequently expelled to Australia in 1942. In Melbourne, received wide press coverage and great controversy. He lectured widely and contributed to various professional and other publications, covering not only subjects in Christianity and medicine/psychiatry, but also his opinions about the war and Japan, communism and the White Australia policy. As a Christian me-dical doctor and scientist, he was interested in the "nature of man", the relationship or interaction between body (brain and/or material) and mind/spirituality, the origin of human consciousness in relation to time-space energy, the healing of disease, and the etiology of mental illness and spiritual treatment. He was passionate in his stated belief that God's Word applied to the whole spec-trum of human relationships, from personal to international, as well as to the natural world. Dr. McLaren kept his conservative Christian beliefs, but he respected traditional Asian philosophies. His thoughts and experiences were publically expressed through lectures, journals and books, not only in Korea but also in China and Australia. He was a man of compassion, courage and ceaseless intellectual activity, a pioneer of psychiatry and a lifelong explorer of the Bible. Korean psych-iatrists, who may feel confused by the many complicated new medical theories and advanced technologies, still find Dr. McLaren's simple and clear teachings on science, medicine, and human nature and his practice of caring for mental patients with a compassionate, humanitarian and Christian attitude a challenging example to emulate.
Achievement ; Asian Continental Ancestry Group ; Australia ; Bible ; Bombs ; China ; Christianity ; Communism ; Consciousness ; Empathy ; Human Characteristics ; Humans ; Hyperthermia, Induced ; Internship and Residency ; Japan ; Korea ; Lectures ; Love ; Mental Disorders ; Mentally Ill Persons ; Military Personnel ; Missions and Missionaries ; Philosophy ; Philosophy, Medical ; Porphyrins ; Psychiatry ; Psychoanalysis ; Schools, Medical ; Spirituality ; Spouses ; Writing