The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 3 (June 2014) | Page 40
Understanding Stress and Post-traumatic Growth
Understanding Stress and
Post-traumatic Growth
A course for returning veterans on Tiatros-Research, a flexible
HIPAA-Compliant collaboration platform for clinical research
Authors: K.P Norman, M. Dallman, K. Cerrone, S. Norman, D. Altobello, J. Homchowdhury
BACKGROUND
Young people serving in the armed
forces are given extensive periods of
military training at entry to prepare them
for service life. During training, they are
provided with concepts and constructs
of the military culture to ensure they
are physically, mentally and emotionally fit for the tasks ahead. By contrast,
preparation for return from the military
to civilian life, jobs and family is given
far less time and attention, even though
this is an equally great change from their
recent lives, experiences and the personal
growth that occurred while they were in
the military culture.
There remains stigma associated with
reporting mental difficulties that may
accompany the transition from military
to civilian life and because of this, there
is some distrust in seeking answers to
these openly[1, 2]. Moreover, sleep disturbances[3], risky behaviours[4, 5], family problems[5] and homelessness[6], are
common in returning veterans even in
those without diagnoses of mental difficulties.
With the goal of helping those in, or
leaving the military to resolve some of
these issues both conveniently and in private, the Young Adult and Family Center
(YAFC) in the Department of Psychiatry
at the University of California, San Francisco has teamed up with Tiatros Inc. to
leverage its scalable, cloud-based, socialnetwork styled software platform that
enables collaborative, individual-centric
services. Using the HIPAA compliant
Tiatros solution, we have designed an
initial course that enhances understanding of their experiences by the Veterans.
The first course emplaced within Tiatros. 'Next Mission: Stress Resilience
38
June 2014
and Personal Growth', is an exploration of
the neurophysiology, biology and narrative process of the military experience
to help service members tell their own
stories and better understand their own
journey into, through and out of the
military. The course is intended also to
develop the connections and sense of
community that are so important to transitioning veterans.
The course is given over sixteen 2-hour
classes. Each class is comprised of 3
parts : The narrative portion is based on
the 6 stages in Joseph Campbell's Hero
with a Thousand Faces[7] and is illustrated
with clips from movies and readings; A
neuroscience portion deals with the common changes that occur in the brain
after stress and trauma; The third portion
is comprised of mindfulness and writing exercises. There are two sets of writing assignments for each class: Journal writing for
twenty minutes a day which is entirely
private to the individual student, and
writing in response to questions based
on the narrative content and neuroscience portions of the course which can
be viewed by course moderators and
other students within the Tiatros solution. Additionally, in the final sessions
the students present to the others in the
class group their course projects that
are to be related to some aspect of the
monomyth as it relates to their personal
journey.
Course administrators post an individual
invitation to each student to sign up for
the course using Tiatros' secure messaging function. The platform supports
secure communications (to one or to
many) through various contemporary
social networking methods including:
Posts; audio and video blogging; Video
chats; SMS; and, multi-party video conferencing, while allowing simultaneous
but separate communication threads
among various subsets of students and
instructors in the class. Tiatros uses a
number of proprietary technical strategies to preset and enforce access rights
that ensure the privacy of communications. Easy-to-use and redundant methods assure that instructors can exercise complete and instant control over
which communications are available
to everyone and which are available to
only a subset of the class community.
The course administrators have access
through Tiatros to the site of each student who is taking the course to ensure
the safety of all participants. Students
individually control the degree of interstudent interaction.
Because Tiatros' proprietary content
management and delivery engine handles content files of any size, and content files that are created in virtually
any underlying application, including all
common document , image, audio and
video formats, all of the course classes
and content are contained entirely within
Tiatros. Fidelity of the content files is
fully preserved and the viewing experience is identical to that experienced while
watching a movie downloaded from a
premium online service to a laptop.
Content is streamed directly to mobile
phones, and tablets as well as to laptop
computers. Importantly, this capability
in reverse permits flexibility in the format of student to the required homework; the student is allowed to choose
from the most personally appropriate
medium: video, uploaded photographs,
written and/or and hand-drawn pictorial
responses.
Assignments and course content are
stored within the course Library on Tiatros. The course administrators can easily
pre-set an automatic delivery schedule