The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
Professor
Christopher Dandeker, Professor of Military Sociology at King’s
College London
and
Co-Director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, told
the House of
Commons
Defence Committee in March 2008 that:
“… so far
as our own research is concerned … I think that the Harmony
Guidelines
have been
well constructed because the evidence suggests that if you stay
within
them they
[Service Personnel] do not suffer; if you go beyond them there is a
20 to
50 percent
likelihood that they will suffer in terms of PTSD [Post Traumatic
Stress
In his
evidence to the Inquiry, Air Marshal David Pocock, Deputy Chief of
Defence Staff
(Personnel)
from 2005 to 2007, questioned whether Professor Dandeker was
right
to suggest
that the Harmony Guidelines were an appropriate basis for assessing
the
effect of
operational deployment on individuals.102
The
Guidelines had been derived in
a
straightforward way from the planning assumptions used in SDR 98
(‘what operations
have we
got? How many people have we got? … that means that they can spend
this long
away’). AM
Pocock said that his focus had been on the broader relationship
between time
deployed on
operations and the risk of mental health issues.
142.
The Inquiry
asked Lt Gen Lillywhite how the MOD’s approach to mental health
had
changed
over the course of Op TELIC.103
143.
Lt Gen
Lillywhite told the Inquiry that the “perennial challenge” was to
overcome
the stigma
associated with mental health issues:
“A lot of
effort has gone into educating both commanders and individuals
that
psychological
adverse effects is not something that needs to be hidden. We
have
not fully
succeeded, nor has any other nation, and neither has the civilian
population.
Mental
health continues to have a stigma amongst many that actually
inhibits its
presenting
for care early.”
144.
Lt Gen
Lillywhite highlighted the introduction of a decompression period
after
an
operational deployment and TRiM, as two significant developments in
the MOD’s
approach to
supporting mental health.
145.
The MOD
provided compensation to Service Personnel who suffered from
illness
or injury,
including mental health problems.
101
Fourteenth
Report from the Defence Committee, Session 2007-2008,
Recruiting
and retaining Armed
Forces
Personnel, Oral and Written Evidence (25 March
2008),
HC424.
102
Public
hearing, 19 July 2010, pages 68-70.
103
Public
hearing, 20 July 2010, pages 55-57.
68