Military life and mental health

Feeling immersed in negativity? Making silly mistakes? Feeling sad, sick, lonely and self-hating. Maybe you are overweight, underweight, unfit, and you feel generally unmotivated and with free-floating anxiety… and you don’t enjoy anything anymore. You hate yourself for feeling like you’re not yourself. You are all up in your head, and you are mentally bullying yourself. Why?

Back in the very beginning, when you were strong, capable, ambitious, and competitive, you built your sense of self on the stigmatising of weakness, especially in the military. You were fast, quick-thinking, straight and tall, with carefully groomed attitudes toward high performance under pressure for yourself and your team. To step up, you needed to denigrate any sign of weakness, slowness, or sadness. It is in this effort that the seeds were sown for later, much later, poor mental health. The question is, how do we build mental strength without demonising weakness? The answer is not a dichotomy. You can acknowledge the weight of negative experience in the growth toward true strength.

You are not mentally strong if you rely on a foundation that stigmatises the mentally challenged. This type of profile has holes like Swiss cheese.  Sustainable mental health requires a truly solid foundation that includes a healthy recognition of the effects of life experience on mood, capability, motivation and engagement. Everyone will face times of challenge; in fact, most of us harbour deep-seated self-doubt much of the time. But the key is accepting the need for self-help-seeking for health without fear of reprisal.

It is quite natural to fear reprisal. First, because we already feel disappointed in ourselves. But also because we know we can be pulled from our team, from everything that feeds our identity, our welfare, our sense of effectiveness. We have seen the support systems weaponised to exclude others, to punish and reject. The administrative processes of support are often tortured. We also know that our every move is judged by others both formally and informally. This is our military culture.

It is all very well to say that this needs to change. But identity in the military is high stakes, and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to recover from a mental health chink in your armour. We need to strengthen the armour by normalising and simplifying self-help-seeking, by separating consideration of performance from indices of transient mental health challenge in formal personnel reporting. And we need better work-life balance so that immersion in an active military identity can co-exist with a normal family and community life and service must actively facilitate, encourage and reward this.