Critics of CSF2

Lt. Col. Richard Toye is commander of the 883rd in Afghanistan. He is deployed as a member of the Army Reserve, to help monitor and care for the mental well-being of service members, any one of whom could be exposed to combat trauma through IEDs or gunfire. 

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He is highly skeptical of CSF2, for example. “If we train you to be spiritual and to have a social network and to be physically fit and to have lots of hobbies, well, just because those are the characteristics of people who are stress-resilient, it doesn’t mean that I can take those demands and put them on your head and make you stress-resilient,” Toye said. “It is pseudoscience. And we put a lot of money into it.”

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Researchers in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Business Administration have partnered with the U.S. Army to evaluate a new mental fitness program that could eventually lead to lower rates of depression, suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers.

“Our goal is to see if this type of training helps soldiers to become more resilient and more psychologically stable,” said Dina Krasikova, a post-doctoral research associate.

“There’s a lot of problems the Army is having right now,” said Pete Harms, an assistant professor of management who has been involved with the research for about three years. “The program is designed to improve psychological resiliency and better equip soldiers to cope with the stress of the battlefield.”

No training program is able to completely eliminate the psychological problems that are so prevalent in the military, Harms said.

“It’s not a magic bullet,” he said. “It’s not going to solve the suicide problem. It’s not going to solve the PTSD problem. These are very complex issues. Doing some online modules isn’t going to cure someone, but it might make them more aware and be more likely to seek help.”

• The U.S. Army's Ambitious Fight Against PTSD

• CBA researchers partner with U.S. Army to evaluate mental fitness program