Psychological Support for Military Personnel on Operations

- The health assistant (unit doctor for the front line forces) treats, gives account of the sanitary conditions and visits the unit first aid posts.


- The psychiatrist, in addition to the specific actions which have been defined, informs the high command and make suggestions according to his analysis of the situations.


- The high command helped by its * moral assistant + take decisions in terms of command by using the front-line officer's observation by taking into account the analyses of the officers of the Humane Relations Centre.
PART TWO :THE ROLE PLAYED BY PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIKELY EVOLUTION


1/ The role of psychology

At this stage of analysis, it is important to take into account the reasons explaining the absence of psychologists.

First of all, the number of qualified psychologists in the armed forces is very low: between five and ten persons. Then, most of the psychologists are officers belonging to such arms as infantry, military engineering ...

In France like in most countries, the title of psychologist is protected, follows a professional code of ethics, and requires at least five years to be fully acquired.

It does mean that an officer, even trained in a military Academy, who gets in this way, has to take up entirely new specialized studies and also give up every hopes of command, if the Army wants to make his formation profitable.

On the contrary, the title of sociologist is not protected, so one year is enough to graduate in sociology, as soon as an officer has been trained in the military Academy. The training allows them to become at the same time specialists in social science and also preserve their military career and they can attend courses at the War College too.

This situation combined with the lack of knowledge of the headquarters staff about the differences between psychologists and sociologists results in the mixture between various subjects and in employing only sociologists, who belong to a centre whose aim is historically and officially to * detect the appearances of psychological or sociologic phenomena in the Army +.

Adding that this centre directly depends on headquarters staff and that its function is to dispatch social science specialists in the field, the ability of psychologists to intervene is very limited..

This position is reinforced by the systematic attitude of the psychiatrists of the health service, who use their prerogatives and their status of doctors to ensure an exclusive intervention in the psychological domain.