Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Using statistical techniques to understand the unique needs of military personnel experiencing mental health difficulties: moving away from assuming patient homogeneity to understanding heterogeneity
  1. Laura Josephine Hendrikx1,2 and
  2. D Murphy1,2
  1. 1 Research Department, Combat Stress, Leatherhead, Surrey, UK
  2. 2 King's College London, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Ms Laura Josephine Hendrikx; laura.hendrikx{at}kcl.ac.uk

Abstract

Gold standard treatments for military personnel seeking support for mental health difficulties are often standardised and manualised to ensure high levels of treatment fidelity. While manualised treatments are preferable to less evidence-based idiosyncratic approaches, they may not fully account for the differences in symptom profiles present in patients with the same psychological diagnosis. Indeed, recent findings have highlighted that a significant proportion of individuals do not benefit from the ‘gold standard’ treatments. This brief report discusses the utility of statistical techniques, specifically latent profile analysis and network analysis, to support the transition to more evidence-based idiosyncratic, personalised care for clinical military, and general, populations. Further incorporation of such analysis methods may support arriving at a framework to support the personalisation of care in terms of the selection and adaption of evidence-based approach treatments based on individual clinical need.

  • statistics & research methods
  • adult psychiatry
  • mental health

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Footnotes

  • Contributors Both authors completed to the writing and revision of the current manuscript.

  • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.