Am I the only one wondering how many guys on submarines lose it each year on a voyage and get the straitjacket treatment? I always wondered about that, by the way.
Well, let me check my annual highlights issue of "Submarine Force Review"... hunh, funny, the "straitjackets" column used to be listed right here after "alcoholics", "anti-depressants", and "chainsmokers".
Kidding aside, I've never been on a crew where straitjacketing was necessary. I've seen hundreds of shouting matches, quite a few nightmares, one fistfight (in the 1970s), several episodes of "frozen in fear", and a couple [-]screamers[/-] emotional breakdowns. I've seen several people curled up in a corner in a fetal ball who later decided to try some other part of the Navy. I knew of one CO who made a mistake and simply gave up on his job afterwards, forcing the XO to pretty much run the show for the day on the way back inport. But that's what XOs are for, and both knew that the CO was going to lose his job after that mistake.
One of my good friends was struggling with claustrophobia for over a decade of sea duty, but he really liked submarine pay and managed to hide the issue. His practice was to stay awake 18-20 hours and then collapse in exhaustion for a few hours' sleep before jerking awake in the narrow confines of his bunk. Unfortunately one day he developed appendicitis and the pain kept him from sleeping, and the claustrophobia took over. The corpsman had him laying on a mattress in the middle of the torpedo room plugged into a morphine drip for most of the 24 hours that it took us to race back to port for the MEDEVAC. The appendectomy was routine (at Tripler hospital, not onboard!), he was disqualified from further submarine sea duty, and he finished out his career in submarine maintenance facilities. He's doing fine today. Good guy.
I spent 1992-1994 at COMSUBPAC staff headquarters in the Operations department. I was briefed in to nearly all of the Pacific's current events (and 100% of their waterspace management) as well as most of the force's Cold War history. I never came across a straitjacket story. The rest of what I read, heard about, and saw would fill a book-- but it's already been written:
Amazon.com: Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (9780060977719): Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew: Books
The submarine lifestyle comes with plenty of preloaded stress (even before you stir in the dysfunctional personalities and dog the hatches) but the reality is that it's just looooong periods of frustrating boredom punctuated by short periods of intense panic. The shore training is realistic (and stressful) enough that most people's problems show up before they even make it to sea duty. I dealt with far more personnel casualties at training commands (including two suicides and a murder/suicide) than I ever did on sea duty.
Makes ya wonder why there are so few military ERs, right?