Sandwiches will be served from 12.40.

Mental health is a ‘hot topic’ for the UK Armed Forces and country it serves. There is concern over the effect of service on military personnel and misunderstanding about the realities of mental health and mental illness and its’ treatment. Both the realities and the ‘rumour’ have impact on the UKAF at a variety of levels – tactical, operational and strategic. What are these impacts and what is being done to mitigate them now and if the Cognitive domain is the next theatre of warfare, what might we need to know, re-learn and innovate?

Surgeon Commander Charlotte Evans is the Royal Navy Hudson Fellow and a Visiting Research Fellow with CCW. Until recently she was the Consultant Advisor in Psychiatry to the Head of Royal Navy Healthcare. She was assigned to deliver subject matter expertise in her clinical role as a consultant psychiatrist, alongside non-clinical support and advice on the wider aspects of mental health and illness through strategic, operational and tactical levels. She has delivered particular emphasis on provision of support in the maritime operational space, and training personnel to support good mental health in their people to enhance operational capability.
Early career highlights have included operational deployments as a General Duties Medical Officer on RFA LARGS BAY and HMS MONTROSE and RICHMOND, predominantly conducting disaster relief planning and training, and counter-piracy activity off the East coast of Africa. She has also conducted deployed mental health research and completed her MSc in Evidence Based Healthcare through the University of Oxford alongside her clinical training. Her dissertation focussed on the occupational outcomes for military mental health patients.
Current research interests: the role of mental health in the moral component of warfighting, whether traditional understanding of military operational mental health delivery meets current demands, and what psychiatry may have to offer in defence against cognitive warfare.