Armed Forces: Mental Illness
(asked on 27th January 2015) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, pursuant to the Answer of 27 January 2015 to Question 221805, what estimate he has made of the number of service personnel who have suffered mental illness in each of the last 10 years.
The following table shows the number of UK Armed Forces personnel who were assessed as having a mental health condition, either at one of the military Departments of Community Mental Health (DCMH) or one of the facilities contracted by Ministry Of Defence (MOD) to provide in-patient treatment, from 2007 to 2014.
Financial Year (FY) | Number of personnel assessed |
2007-08 | 3,559 |
2008-09 | 3,199 |
2009-10 | 3,753 |
2010-11 | 3,894 |
2011-12 | 3,927 |
2012-13 | 4,943 |
2013-14 | 5,159 |
Up to the end of FY2011-12, data was sourced from DCMH returns. From FY 2012-13 onwards, additional figures were obtained from the electronic patient record held on the Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DMICP). DMICP records include mental healthcare treatment provided at other facilities, such as local military primary health centres.
The MOD has compiled central records of personnel with mental health conditions since 2007. To identify mental health assessments prior to 2007 would require a search of individual medical records and would incur disproportionate cost.