Abstract: Although the mental health status of members of the Chinese army has been highlighted by many researchers, the results of these researches are contradictory. Although some researches have reported that the members of the Chinese army have good mental health, others have reported it to be quite poor. Thus, their mental status remains unclear. This article aims to investigate the mental health status of the members of the Chinese army using a new approach.
In this study, 77 articles pertaining to the mental health status of the members of the Chinese army were used, and 56164 army members in China were surveyed. A meta-analysis was conducted on these articles in which the SCL-90 was used as a tool. Further, the researches were divided into two groups, one group comprising subjects under military stress and the other comprising subjects that were not under military stress.
The results revealed that the mental health status of members not under military stress was on par with the norm set by the army; the mental health status of members under military stress was higher than the army norms, but lower than army norms in terms of military stress and on par with army norms after stress. Further, the mental health of army members in town garrisons was higher than that of members in plateau garrisons and much higher than that of members in frontier defense garrisons. In addition, the mental health of members of the army who were under stress was lower than that at a stage after stress and much lower than that at a stage before stress; moreover, some factors such as the zone, rank seniority, and stress level had significant influences on the SCL-90 scores. The sensitivity and publication bias analyses showed that the stability of this research was good and that it had no publication bias.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the mental health status of members of the Chinese army was not poor; moreover, compared with civilian norms and national military standards, the choice of personnel norms as a criteria was beneficial; further, some factors such as the zone, rank seniority, and stress level had significant influences on the SCL-90 scores

Key words: army members, SCL-90, meta-analysis, mental health