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has aggressively pursued multiple programs to address this challenging issue. This includes revising the Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness (CSF2) program to include family members, launching the Ready and Resilient Campaign to guide the Army’s efforts to improve the performance, resilience, and readiness of Soldiers, implementing Advanced Situational Awareness (ASA) training, and incorporating the Human Dimension within the Force 2025 vision. In essence, perhaps we can put ourselves out of a job treating PTSD on the backend, by doing a better job on the frontend by effectively preparing SMs before a deployment to be more resilience to stress.
These factors led to our lab placing a significant focus on retooling the BRAVEMIND PTSD treatment system for the purpose of pre-deployment resilience training with a program referred to as STRIVE: Stress Resilience in Virtual Environments. STRIVE emerged from 3D graphic content developed for the BRAVEMIND VRET simulations and was developed to foster resilience by creating a set of combat simulations that can be used as contexts for the experiential learning of psychoeducational, cognitive-behavioral, mindfulness, breathing exercises, and other emotional coping strategies. In STRIVE, users are immersed and engaged in a variety of narrative-based, virtual combat “missions” where they are confronted with emotionally challenging situations that are sometimes experienced in the combat environment. Interaction within such emotionally challenging scenarios aims to provide users with a more meaningful context in which to learn and practice psychoeducational and cognitive coping strategies that are believed to psychologically prepare them for a combat deployment.
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