Triton 2025 - Magazine - Page 16
FIVE VIEWS ON PSYCHOLOGICAL WELLBEING
‘Mental health is a force multiplier’
From a degree in medicine, Professor Neil Greenberg’s career has taken him through 23
years deployed as a psychiatrist and researcher in the UK armed forces to his current
position where he is a senior member of the military mental health research team and
principal investigator into the psychological impacts of trauma on organisations. He also
runs a psychological health consultancy.
And yet, when he embarked on his degree at Southampton University, he was thinking of being
a surgeon. “In my third year at university, I joined the Royal Navy as a medical student. Then, in
my 昀椀fth year I really enjoyed my psychiatry placement and not my surgery placement,” he says.
“You never know what’s going to come together, but for me it was psychiatry and the Navy.”
Greenberg served on warships and submarines, and with two Royal Marines Commando units.
“When it comes to managing organisations and teams, the military does that all the time;
they send people routinely to dif昀椀cult places around the world to do challenging things. That
also means they have a duty of care. I think in mainstream society, organisations – including
maritime ones – have become more interested in looking after their staff over time, but it’s
been a slow process.”
There is, he says, a great phrase within the military: ‘Mental health is a force multiplier’. “If you
have 100 troops and they’re really well led, psychologically supportive of each other and in a
good state, you can 昀椀ght 1,000 troops who are poorly led and chaotic and probably win. And
there’s another good phrase, which is that the psychological welfare of troops is primarily a
chain-of-command responsibility. Keeping people well and dealing with them when they’re
distressed, rather than ill – that’s primarily about line management.”
Greenberg served seven months on a nuclear submarine, which meant two-month stretches
under water. “You have to get on, because there is nowhere to go”, he says “So much about
leadership, management and interactions was actively done.”
Good leadership has a signi昀椀cant impact on people’s mental health, he emphasised. “You could
have teams in places where people will be injured or killed, whose mental health was in昀椀nitely
better than people in the main base location who had a boss who was an unpleasant, toxic bully.”
Some of the military approaches have fed into civilian society, he says. For example, TRiM
(Trauma Risk Management), is the military’s peer support system in which frontline chefs,
soldiers and mechanics are trained to be able to sit down with a colleague and ask them about
their mental health.
“You don’t need to spend 16 years teaching them to be therapists; but teaching them how to
have a conversation about mental health can nip problems in the bud.”
Some people exposed to a traumatic incident do well, but a small
proportion could become ill, he says. “You want to 昀椀nd those ones early
on, so you can get them the right sort of treatment and optimise the
chances for them to recover rather than become ill.”
Neil Greenberg is a clinical and academic
psychiatrist at King’s College London.
16 / Triton 2025
