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4 Bulletproofing the Psyche From the psychological lens, research has also provided substantial insight into the processes and mechanisms that may explain how exposure to com- bat stress gives rise to mental health disorders and, ultimately, influence individuals in the longer term. Now that an extensive body of work has developed, there is an opportunity to integrate what is known, identify remaining gaps, and propose promising strategies to address these. The pres- ent chapter provides an overview of key findings in this area based on research conducted on U.S. and Canadian military personnel deployed in support of the conflicts in Southwest Asia since 2001, with the aim of pro- viding a more integrative perspective of psychosocial pathways in the course of PTSD and its sequelae. Burden of Postdeployment Mental Health Problems Given the traumatic nature of combat, it is not surprising that a great deal of research on the mental health of military personnel has focused on the psychological impacts of trauma exposure. Despite only having been formally recognized as a mental health condition in the third American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) in 1980 (Friedman, 2016), PTSD has evolved into one of the most commonly researched impacts of combat exposure. As noted by Friedman (2016), the PTSD concept repre- sented an important shift in psychiatric theory through the acknowledgment that etiologic factors for the disorder were outside of the individual rather than resulting from an inherent weakness. It is argued that the recent missions in Afghanistan and Iraq have created a unique set of conditions for increased risk of PTSD among military person- nel (Schnurr, Lunney, Bovin, & Marx, 2009): in the United States, these wars primarily relied on National Guard and reserve forces and required person- nel to go on multiple deployments to meet the demands of the conflict (Galea et al., 2012) tours were longer, with shorter periods between them and, finally, during the tours themselves, commonly reported stressors included the risk of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), suicide bombers, or han- dling human remains among several others (Tanielian, Jaycox, Adamson, & Metscher, 2008). In turn, significant efforts have been placed on quantifying the burden of PTSD among military personnel deployed in support of these missions. In Canada, an estimated 7.7 percent of Regular Force members with an Afghanistan-related deployment reported PTSD in the past year according to a recent survey on mental health in the CAF (Boulos & Zamorski, 2016). Despite its relatively greater abundance, research on the prevalence of PTSD among U.S. military personnel returning from deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq has produced variable results. Indeed, the wide variation in estimates of PTSD across U.S. studies is among the main criticisms of research in this