Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
americanmilitarynews.com
Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
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Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#2I wonder if our prison folk are healthier than Wagners.
Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#3Maybe military service could help some of these folks out of their unfortunate situation, given a longer training period and proper support.
Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#4PMCs love this study!
Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#5Maybe military service could help some of these folks out of their unfortunate situation, given a longer training period and proper support.
The Marines slimmed my brother down but gave him a variety of mental health issues. I preferred him overweight, happy, and more functional.
These are self inflicted wounds, high level. They don’t qualify because of the system we’ve built. Want healthy candidates for soldiers? Optimize for affordable nutrition and universal healthcare/mental health access [1] [2] [3] [4]. Don’t? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Rampant obesity rates and drug use continues.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30908249
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35385503
Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#6Big food companies pushing carbs while funding anti-low carb diet studies have nothing to do with it.
Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#7There's a qualification of some importance missing here:
77% of young Americans who applied ... were rejected for various reasons.
ie: Most young people who want to join the forces don't meet the minimum standards.
Perhaps the vast bulk of people that do meet those standards see no future for themselves in the US forces and don't apply.
And there's no easily teased out figure on the health of young Americans in general here w/out additional info about application rates and demographics.
Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#81. "Drug use" probably includes soft drugs like cannabis.
2. Basically any diagnosis of a mental health condition, like ADHD, will block military service. This is true even if symptoms are well managed without medication. The rise of diagnosis of these conditions combined with digital records means a lot of people are prohibited to join due to mental health that would have been overlooked in previous decades.
3. This serves as the official excuse for why recruitment numbers are down. IMO recruitment numbers are down because Iraq/Afghanistan was such a shitshow.
Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#9It would be interesting to see how many of the remaining 23% are in the slice of society where a military career makes financial sense. When I joined the Army I was going from having been fired from McD's last month to making $1K a month with food and shelter taken care of. That made sense at the time. My kid is plenty skinny, mentally stable, and drug free, but he's also a successful college student and budding entrepreneur, so he's not going to be wearing a uniform unless we go full WW3 conscription.
Re: Study: 77% of young Americans too fat, mentally ill, on drugs to join military
#101. "Drug use" probably includes soft drugs like cannabis. 2. Basically any diagnosis of a mental health condition, like ADHD, will block military service. This is true even if symptoms are well managed without medication. The rise of diagnosis of these conditions combined with digital records means a lot of people are prohibited to join due to mental health that would have been overlooked in previous decades. 3. This…
Re: #2 that’s ridiculous. Diagnosis like ADHD might as well be diagnosable personality traits.