Resilience and other reactions to military deployment: the complex task of identifying distinct adjustment trajectories.

I their study of Danish veterans deployed to Afghanistan, Andersen and colleagues1 provide compelling evidence of psychological resilience to the effects of military deployment and some insight into the factors underlying it. In addition, they present evidence of a wide array of other adjustment trajectories following military deployment. In relation to resilience, 78% of Danish soldiers experienced minimal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms before deployment and up to 2.5 years after. These results are consistent with other recent investigations of soldiers’ capacity to weather the stress of war. For example, Bonanno and colleagues2 found that 83% of American military personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan showed low levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms both before and up to 5 years after their deployment. Similarly, Dickstein and colleagues,3 in a longitudinal study of American peacekeepers in Kosovo, found that over 80% showed minimal PTSD symptoms before their deployment and no increase in distress after it. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the considerable majority of soldiers are able to return to their normal levels of functioning after deployment to a war zone. The human capacity to endure and even thrive under conditions of acute stress, once considered rare or a reflection of extraordinary coping abilities, is now increasingly recognized as normative,4 the rule rather than the exception. In response to events as diverse as bereavement, traumatic injury, life-threatening disease, and even terrorist attack,5 most people are able to sustain their psychological equilibrium. What predicts this capacity for resilience? Andersen et al1 found that resilient soldiers, when compared to soldiers who experienced various PTSD trajectories, tended to report lower levels of predeployment depression and greater emotional stability. They also reported fewer earlier life traumas. However, in addition to these dispositional strengths, resilient soldiers also reported that they felt themselves to be in less danger than other soldiers. Were these soldiers resilient because they faced fewer lifethreatening circumstances or because they were simply more psychologically hardy? It is not clear. Prior research suggests that resilience is a complex brew, composed of multiple ingredients, all of them contributing (or detracting from) the likelihood of a resilient outcome.4 Andersen and colleagues’