SAFETY The Mental Health Benefits of Scuba Diving – by Dan Orr, President, Dan Orr Consulting and Vincent Meurice, bathysmed.com
After returning home from a tour of duty in Southeast Asia in 1968, like many young men and women who re- turn from the military, I was struggling with issues that were definitely affecting my mental and physical health. As I re- turned to college, I heard that a local scuba instructor and dive center owner was looking for certified divers to help as pool assistants for his scuba classes. I had received my scuba diver certification in 1964, along with my brother Tom,
though no data or research results came from those early years to prove the benefits of scuba diving on mental health, there has since been considerable research demonstrating the value of therapeutic outdoor recreation on those, especially veterans with mental health challenges. Research has shown that approximately 1.8% of non-vet- erans, 4.5% of military veterans with no wartime experience, and 10.4% of veterans with wartime experience (Vietnam) still experience mental health challenges even after 50 years or more. More recently, it was found that 36.9% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans received a diagnosis of mental illness, such as PTSD, anxiety disorder, or depression. It has now been well-documented that therapeutic outdoor recreation has been shown consistently effective across a variety of mental health challenges. Scuba diving has been shown to be increasingly popular among veterans. Scuba diving offers a variety of benefits that being and mental health among veterans can be partially at- tributed to their participation in a recreational scuba diving program. Of those, 60% of veterans self-reported a subse- quent positive outlook and an overall improvement in their psychological well being. Vincent and I would now like to dive more deeply into the notion that the use of sport, in this case recreational scuba diving, to overcome stress-related pathologies, some of which are as severe as PTSD, is nothing new. Generally speaking, all studies show that taking part in sports, especially nature sports, has a positive impact on mental health. The real ques- tion here is: what is the added value of diving compared to other sports, and why is going underwater more effective than hiking in the mountains or kayaking in rivers? The answer isn't always obvious, but with a little digging, it becomes as clear as visibility in the Cenotes in the Mexican Yucatan. can have a positive impact on the emotional struggles veterans expe- rience following separation from the military. One study reported a 90% improvement in general well-
and I wanted to get back into diving. Once I returned to diving, I began to sense that something was different. It truly seemed that each time I went under- water, I left my worries, cares, and anxieties at the surface and, even when I returned to the surface, those issues didn’t seem
to be quite as significant or prob- lematic after all. I didn’t realize at the time, but diving was, indeed, therapy for me. A few years later, when I became
a scuba instructor and started the Scuba Program at Wright State University (WSU) in Dayton, Ohio, I had a number of veterans and students with disabilities in my scuba training courses. Sometimes it was subtle, many times unspoken by the person, but I began to notice changes in those taking our scuba diver training courses and I began to think that there may just be some connection between scuba diver training and a person’s ability to deal with stress. I even went so far as to talk with Veterans Affairs and the university psychology department to see if they were interested in looking into the thought that scuba training could be beneficial to veterans and others dealing with stress or other mental health issues. Unfortunately, the departments at the university thought that scuba diving, and recreation in general, had little impact upon emotional stress and what we now call, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite their lack of interest, the WSU Scuba Program became increasingly popular with vet- erans and those with physical and emotional challenges. Al-
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