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There's no question that the San Francisco VA Medical Center, with the support of NCIRE, plays a
major role in advancing veterans health care through research. The excellence of our NCIRE and
SFVAMC investigators, all of whom are UC San Francisco faculty members, is fundamental to our
success in developing cutting edge knowledge that will advance medical treatments of veterans and
others, both locally and worldwide.
Paul Volberding, MD
Chair, NCIRE Board of Directors
Chief of Medicine, SFVAMC
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Karen Seal, MD, MPH
Staff Physician, Medical Service, SFVAMC
Assistant Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, UCSF
Email: karen.seal@ucsf.edu
Diagnosing and Treating Mental Health Disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans
Dr. Seal’s research focus is in understanding the prevalence and predictors of mental health problems in veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and in the development of interventions to overcome barriers to mental health care among this growing veteran population. She is the Principal Investigator of the Vets Return Home Study, a randomized controlled trial to test the efficacy of telephone-administered motivational interviewing to engage Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with mental health disorders in mental health treatment. Dr. Seal published the first national study on the prevalence of mental health disorders in over 100,000 Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007, and has completed several other national-level analyses of disease prevalence and VA health services utilization in this group of veterans. At SFVAMC, Dr. Seal established and is now Co-Director of the Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom Integrated Care Clinic, which provides one-stop primary care, mental health, and social services to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
Seal, KH, Bertenthal D, Miner CR, Sen S, Marmar C. 2007. Bringing the war back home: Mental health disorders among 103,788 us veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seen at VA facilities. Arch Intern Med 167 (5):476-82.
Seal KH, Bertenthal D, Maguen S, Gima K, Chu A, Marmar CR. 2008. Getting beyond ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’: an evaluation of VA post-deployment mental health screening of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Am J Public Health 98(4): 714-20.
Seal KH, Metzler TJ, Gima K, Bertenthal D, Maguen S, Marmar CR. 2009. Growing prevalence of mental disorders among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans: Trends and risk factors for mental health diagnoses in new users of VA healthcare, 2002-2008. Am J Public Health 99(9):1651-8.
Cohen BE, Marmar C, Ren L, Bertenthal D, Seal KH. 2009. Association of cardiovascular risk factors with mental health diagnoses in Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans using VA health care. JAMA 302 (5):489-492.
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