MIT Sloan recently published an article detailing innovative new research from the school’s Post Traumatic Stress Innovations team that may transform how post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is treated in the “2 million men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan”—30 percent of whom are “expected to develop a serious mental health problem.”
Funded in large part by $2.7 billion set aside by Congress, Sloan Professor Thomas Kochan, research scientist Jayakanth “JK” Srinivasan and PhD student Julia DiBenigno ’16 led a study based on the U.S. Army’s “ongoing efforts to improve the mental health of soldiers and veterans.” According to the article, “DiBenigno spent more than 600 hours interviewing and observing mental health providers, commanders and other stakeholders at eighteen clinics across four Army posts.”
DiBenigno often found that “commanders saw mental health providers as taking their soldiers ‘out of the fight,’ while mental health providers saw commanders as impeding their patients’ recoveries.” She adds, “Relations between these two professional groups were defined by intractable identity conflict.”
Clinics where “commanders followed providers’ recommendations 90 percent of the time” were due in large part to “an organizational assignment structure DiBenigno calls “anchored personalization.”
Within anchored personalization, “providers were assigned to specific units within each brigade, but not embedded within them, [which encourages] the development of personalized relationships and perspective-taking between commanders and providers, [who] work together to develop win-win solutions that helped both soldier recoveries and the unit’s mission.”
DiBenigno notes, “My hope is that this organizational structure and concept of anchored personalization can apply not only to the Army, but to other settings where cooperation among different professional groups is necessary to achieve organizational change.”