A review of the scientific evidence on suicide postvention (organizational responses to prevent additional suicides and help loss survivors cope), guidance for other types of organizations, and the perspectives of the family and friends of service members who have died by suicide provide insights that may help the U.S. Department of Defense formulate its own policies and programs in a practical and efficient way.

The National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) provides specialized services for troops suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI). RAND evaluated interactions between the NICoE and providers referring patients and implementing treatment plans.

This report assesses challenges for unit cohesion from integrating women into special operations forces and provides analytical support for validating occupational standards for positions controlled by U.S. Special Operations Command.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill was the largest in U.S. history, releasing an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The scale of the disaster motivated diverse stakeholders to examine the human dimensions of the spill and how communities' resilience to similar threats could be improved. This examination is needed because, as long as humans depend on extracting oil and gas for energy, coastal regions are at risk for spills. In this report, the authors explore how communities, government officials, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and scientists can build community resilience to large oil spills. Researchers found mixed evidence of distress associated with the DWH disaster and a variety of factors that affected the nature and severity of people's experiences.

Children's exposure to violence is common and can lead to mental health problems and delinquent behaviors. Because many interventions have focused on specific violence types or symptoms and been difficult to implement in real-world settings, the evidence base is still emerging. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Safe Start Promising Approaches (SSPA) initiative focused on preventing and reducing the impact of children's exposure to violence through interventions in ten diverse communities. The evaluation examined the effectiveness of the SSPA interventions to address issues for children and families exposed to violence. The ten sites were diverse in their intervention approaches, types of violence exposure targeted, and implementation settings. To evaluate each approach's effectiveness in reducing violence's harmful effects, RAND researchers partnered with the community-based sites to develop a rigorous controlled evaluation design for each intervention, with either a randomized control group or a comparison group selected on similar characteristics. The longitudinal analyses found that families in both the intervention and comparison groups had positive gains on many outcomes, but there was no evidence that the intervention groups improved more. Among those who received Safe Start services, one site produced large, significant improvements in posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, and another site produced medium, significant effects on several outcomes (child self-control, posttraumatic stress disorder, and behavior; caregiver depression; and family conflict). Although the initiative added to knowledge about how to address the problem, there was no clear case for using a particular intervention to help these children and their families.

The report evaluates implementation of a clinician training program to improve care for Navy personnel with co-occurring disorders. Results suggest careful planning for training initiatives could increase implementation of evidence-based practice.

"This research brief presents findings from evaluations of community-based interventions to reduce violence's harmful effects on children"--Publisher's description.

In recent years, the rising rate of suicides by military personnel has generated concern among policymakers, military leaders, and the public at large. Based on a recommendation from an earlier RAND report on preventing suicide among military personnel, this report reviews the literature on gatekeeper models of suicide prevention to better understand what is known about the effectiveness of gatekeepers and gatekeeper training. The report presents a theoretical model describing how gatekeeper training may influence individual knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes that may, in turn, result in intervention behaviors. It then reviews the evidence supporting each of the relationships presented in this model, and concludes with recommendations for advancing research in this field.

This interim report presents preliminary evaluation findings for New York City's Connections to Care program, which seeks to expand access to mental health support for low-income New Yorkers via a task shifting model.

To assist Air Force efforts to prevent and respond to sexual assault, this report focuses on providing a better understanding of sexual assaults committed by airmen, including suspect characteristics and behaviors and risky situations and settings.