Dr Mark Hinton –– INTERVIEW ––
“...IF WE CAN FIND WAYS TO IDENTIFY POTENTIAL RISKS AND LOOK TO MAINTAIN WELLBEING AND PEOPLE’S SENSE OF WORTH AND A POSITIVITY ABOUT THE WAY THEY LIVE THEIR LIVES. WE’RE ON THE RIGHT TRACK BUT WE NEED NUMBERS. WE NEED TO ENCOURAGE VETERANS, IF THEY’RE AT ALL INTERESTED, TO PUT THEIR HAND UP AND WE’LL DO THE BEST WE CAN TO REDUCE THEIR ANXIETY.”
The Last Post: Dr Mark Hinton, clinical psychologist and international expert in veteran and military health, welcome to The Last Post. Mark Hinton: Thanks Greg, a pleasure. TLP: You’re currently involved in a study with the Centenary of Anzac Centre, which was an initiative of Phoenix Australia. Tell us a bit about that Mark. MH: We’re currently involved in around 15 studies that I have responsibility for and there’s a raft of other studies that are currently underway at Phoenix so we’re heavily involved in research. The brief that I have in particular is around veterans mental health, the improvement of veterans mental health and that of their families. Probably the most topical area we have at the moment and one of the great interests of ours is anger. That particular study we’re looking at right now is examining factors that are associated with and a precipitant to anger. Why has this come up? Because there are a number of signature mental health conditions of veterans. Obviously, everybody jumps on the idea that PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is a key problem for the group and that that is the only group. It is most certainly one of the most challenging areas of mental health that we’ve got to work with. But we find that around that we’ve got some additional issues that arise from the PTSD with
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people being immersed in high stressed environments and that’s not only with our veterans, that’s also with our first respondents, and that’s specifically around the emotional regulation and anger and that’s something that we found was quite prominent. We found that if people presenting with what we call problematic anger is that that can compromise their treatment, their ability to engage and to make good use of what we think is good quality treatment for PTSD. We’re doing some really interesting work in focusing on anger, particularly using new technology. This is always a concern of ours but we’re using what we call Ecological Momentary Assessments. We are asking a group of self-referred veterans who have self-identified that they have anger problems, to undergo a ten-day period of assessment. And through that period, four times a day will pop up what we call micro-surveys and that will help us look at, across the course of a day, as to how they’re travelling and what may be potential precipitance to their anger. Why we ask this is that we’ve found that this one-size-fits-all anger that was anticipated is not the case. There’s a great deal of difference between ruminative anger, where it builds and builds, we have quite impulse anger, where people, and they’ll tell you this, go from zero to 100 in no time at all and are responding as if it’s life and death. And we have
