Psychiatry, Mental Health Nursing and Healthcare

Biography

Biography: Suzie Beaudoin

Abstract

Resilience has become the flavour of the month when it comes to coping strategies and prevention of mental health illnesses. Younger generations often demonstrate a lack of military identity and as a result, a lack of resiliency. Indeed, each generation found in the Canadian Armed Forces have their own motivations, caracteristics and challenges. The main objective is to bring them all together in a cohesive team which will result in improved resilience. Many recommendations were raised to build military identity; early training to build team cohesion (vertical and horizontal), integration of the younger generations by offering a more lineant work/life balance, allowing all members to participate in the decision making, offering a mentoring program, shifting the traditional leadership roles to a motivational role and to adapt (when possible) the working environment and conditions to civilian’s standards. Also, in order to prevent mental health illnesses, it is recommended to build resiliency. This would be enalbed with: better screenings and/or personnality testing (looking for sense of initiative, ingenuity or ressourcefulness) in the recrutement process, working with member’s strengths and skills, increasing team cohesion and allowing camaraderie to happen within team members, creating and supporting social support for all military members as well as their families, finding their “raison d’être” (purpose) and by increasing positive feedback (to increase job satisfaction). Leadership must support their team by helping the transition and the “infusion” of all the different identities and the work environnement has to soften their rigid culture to achieve a maximised engagement from their younger members.