干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Since the Vietnam War numerous epidemiologic researches have attempted to determine the factors influencing the risk of appearance of war psychic disorders among soldiers taking part in foreign missions. The study of the various individual, collective and specific to experienced situations factors shows combat exposure constitutes the main risk factor. Nevertheless, other situations particularly induce such a risk. taking part in or witnessing atrocity scenes, taking part in mortuary tasks of identification and conditioning of corpses or some individual characteristics such as the existence of psychic antecedents and the previous confrontation with traumatizing events such as childhood ill-treatment or physical and sexual assaults, On the contrary, the quality of the family and social background constitutes a protective factor.

Finally, if the psychopathological characteristics peculiar to the new peace-keeping missions have been analyzed in many reviews, their real impact on psychic morbidity still remains to be studied as well as comparing it with other operational missions.