I'm glad you asked that question. If I had $100 to invest, I would spend half of it on developing treatments that could be used following development of PTSD, and the other half on research aimed at identifying individuals at risk and developing effective prevention strategies. Unfortunately, we have very limited knowledge in those areas.
I believe soldiers are a group with whom we could really do some very good work. They are what we call in our research jargon “captive individuals”. In other words, we can assess all of them before they are exposed to traumatic events. It would be very difficult to do that in the general population. You would have to assess several hundred thousand people in order to obtain a sample of individuals who would be exposed in the following months to traumatic events. With soldiers, we are dealing with a cohort of people who we know will most certainly be exposed to such events.
Of course, the ability to conduct research, to assess risk and protection factors before they leave, and to ascertain which of these factors enable us to predict the individuals who will develop PTSD could open up some very interesting avenues in terms of applying preventive and therapeutic strategies when they return. I would also invest money in the care to be provided people returning home. In my opinion, the current state of our knowledge is not adequate and we therefore cannot afford not to invest in prevention.