quote:

Originally posted by SevenPlusOne:
So, wouldn't Artillerymen suffer from this the most then?

I saw an article not too long ago about just this issue and there has been a serious increase in suicide and TBI. Apparently in Afghanistan there was an increase in the amount of fire missions and multiple tours that exceeded Vietnam, (hard to believe) you would think Vietnam had more but apparently there were more multiple tours in Afghanistan. Having been on the tank ranges more than a few times I would hate to think of being exposed to that blast all the time. Almost forgot apparently also internal organ damage

Just Google searched this.

USMC Link

Link to article I read

Artillerymen would occupy a middle ground between an acute, single-incident but severe trauma like an IED explosion, and the much smaller but high-volume trauma of repeated small-arms fire. Mid-level explosions, less than a single, big blast, but way more of them, still in lower frequency than continual operation of automatic rifles.

The point is each of these trauma modes may result in visibly unique brain damage patterns. The goal then would be to associate those patterns to extreme psychological pathologies, e.g. suicide tendencies.

It is also interesting that in the studied SEAL group two distinct injury patterns emerged: six of the SEALs showed "interface astroglial scarring", but the other two had grotesquely enlarged astrocyte cells. They all died from suicide; but was there anything else different between these two groups?