Women as Resilient in Combat as Men

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Over the last decade, women in the U.S. armed forces have been increasingly exposed to combat in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women have historically higher rates of trauma-related consequences but little is known about how that applies to combat settings.

Based on a representative sample of returning women veterans, Dawn Vogt, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, and colleagues now report that female service members deployed to the two war zones showed almost no negative associations with postdeployment mental health compared to men, and thus “may be as resilient to combat-related stress as men.”

For more about combat-related stress and its treatment, see Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/11/4.1.full.