Core Activities and Findings

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Recent Core Findings

• Women who experience Military Sexual Trauma are at increased risk for further victimization, addictions, low self-esteem, homelessness, and poor psychiatric health compared to both those women who have experienced sexual assault outside of the military, and women who have experienced other non-sexual traumas.
• Female veterans who are homeless have high rates of trauma, PTSD, and addictions. However, innovative treatments that integrate care for addictions as well as PTSD are helpful in improving symptoms in this population of women. Residential treatment also is appearing to be very effective in improving the lives of homeless female veterans.
• About a quarter of homeless female veterans have young children in their care. PTSD in these mothers is associated with poorer mental health and lower school attendance for their young children both at baseline and over a one-year period.
• Police officers can successfully become community partners with mental health clinicians to identify and refer women to mental health professionals. Such interventions can also increase the use of mental health care for children in these families.
• In comparison to VA patient populations, PTSD is likely under-diagnosed in insured individuals in the community. However, once PTSD is identified and diagnosed, medication regimens appear useful as is the case in other health care populations.

Data from the MedStat Company, which compiles paid insurance claims from a number of the largest insurers in the country, are being utilized to examine gender differences in PTSD treatment over time from 1996-2006.

Projects Currently Underway

Core activities include the analyses of data on trauma occurrence and treatment programs. Three main sources of data are used, including evaluation data of Trauma Treatment Programs currently underway in Veteran’s Administration (VA) hospitals; assessments from trauma and related experiences from large nationally-representative population samples; and data from private insurance claims.

Program evaluation data are collected throughout the VA system on all specialized inpatient and outpatient PTSD programs. These data are utilized for quality assurance purposes within the VA. However, we also have the ability to take ‘snapshots’ of data to perform studies addressing the needs and outcomes of patients with PTSD. Core members (Drs. Desai, Harpaz-Rotem) are using such data to examine 1) whether women who experience Military Sexual Trauma have worse outcomes than women who experience other types of trauma; 2) whether veterans returning from recent conflicts are dropping out of PTSD treatment at higher rates than veterans of previous conflicts; and 3) whether a brief functional assessment can be developed to evaluate PTSD care outcomes throughout the VA system that is valid, reliable, and acceptable to veterans in treatment.

Several core members (Drs. Desai, Potenza, Barry) are engaged in analyses of large survey samples such as data from the National Comorbidity Study and the National Epidemiologic Study of Alcohol and Related Disorders (NESARC) to examine 1) gender differences in co-occurrence patterns between PTSD and other psychiatric disorders, 2) the role of alcohol and substances in the self-medication of pain symptoms in traumatized women, and 3) patterns of gambling and problem gambling in traumatized women as compared to men.