Making it in the MilLife

At a recent conference held by NIH, DoD, and the VA, it was apparent that people are beginning to understand that the [mental] health of the family and the service member are interrelated. You can’t care for the individual without caring about and taking care of families and caregivers.  To a military spouse, this seems so intuitive that I had to remind myself that I was in an auditorium full of practioners who need to hear statements like that.  After all, how effective can they be in their jobs if they don’t understand the framework within which they work to effectively support military families?

BG Sutton, the Director of the Defense Centers of Excellence did a great job of charting the course for the day that would follow, charging the audience with the task of working together to identify knowledge gaps and work together to close them.  Mrs. Patti Shinseki followed sharing vignettes of her life with General Shinseki to set the stage for the doctors and scientists in understanding military families. Gen Shinseki was wounded early on his career and headed out of the Army when he received word that as pilot program, the Army was allowing Wounded Warriors to stay in.  She shared powerfully compelling memories of their lives together and impressed upon everyone present that families are critical/crucial factor of the force and addressed some of the issues we all face, “Myth that subsequent separations/deployments get easier is just a myth…it doesn’t get easier.”  Mrs. Shinseki closed with a discussion of the Military Child Education Coalition’s Living in the New Normal initiative: Helping Children Thrive through Good and Challenging Times.

The day started strong and never faltered.  We were treated to a day of incredible presentations by leaders in their field.  It was borderline information overload, but after 9 hours of back to back presentations and breakout sessions, I came away with some significant takeaways.

• There is a shift in deployment from occasional to continuous events.  It’s widely recognized that it is now a matter of “when” you deploy as opposed to “if”.
• Many studies out there studying the corrosive impact of stress due to multiple deployments during wartime.
• No studies of impact on infants and toddlers, only anecdotal information.
• Very little info on impact of children due to injury of parent during wartime.
• Military families are not homogenous, Dr. Cozza encourages differentiating groups further depending on experience.
• Dr. Cozza is from the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress
• Very little info on impact of children due to injury of parent during wartime.
• For children of wounded warriors, self concept of “idealized parent image” is challenged.
• Trauma response is a process, not an event. It has to be constantly monitored
• Learned more information about a Millenium Cohort Study centered around long term health in light of exposure to military concerns and deployments.
• Millenium Cohort Study on spouses and stress launching 2010. Anticipate report out to DoD by 2012.
• The VA is shifting it’s mission: Focusing on Families and Caregivers of Veterans with Trauma.
• VA’s purchased 200,000 copies of Talk, Listen and Connect for distribution to VA centers nationwide.
• Marriage and family counseling has been added to services for family members of all veterans eligible for VA care.
• Information on VA’s changing population – more than 212,000 females have been deployed during OIF/OEF.
• Half of the troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan come from Guard/Reserve community
• VA’s also doing work on stigma as a barrier to getting mental health care.
• Dr.Chandra briefed the RAND/NMFA study- effects of deployment on military children
  • Military children are faring at or above US average on academic engagement, peer relationships
  • Military children are functioning below average in areas of family relationships, anxiety and emotional difficulties.
  • Girls report more anxiety symptoms. Anxiety problems decrease among older children.
  • Re: effects of deployments…girls worry about next deployment, dealing w/parents’ mood swings & worry about how parents are getting along.
  • As months of deployment increase, so do the challenges. Total # months matter more than # of deployments
  • Re: children, deployments and resilience – mental health of non- deployed parent matters
• Information shared regarding reserve component perspectives and transition from weekend warriors to operational force and challenges associated with that
  • 1.1 million troops in reserve components. Average age is 38
  • 50% are married. Most live in communities far away from military installations.
  • Reserve component is juggling 2 careers…how do you meet the demands of 2 employers?
  • Employers are being stressed by deployments as well.
  • Instantaneous communication is a double edged sword when you’re out in the field worried about family at home.
  • Challenge – how do you provide effective services to a geographically dispersed force?
• Air Force pediatrician, Dr. (Maj) Flake spoke about recognizing and responding to child stress.
  • Deployments aren’t going away. How do we make them stepping stones instead of stumbling blocks?
  • 71% of AD servicemembers with children plan on staying in until retirement
  • Resource for teens – Military Youth Coping with Separation: When Family Members Deploy.

There is so much more to share, but perhaps this is a good place to stop.  We’ve been told that the presentations from the conference will be shared on the DCOE website, so keep checking back.  All in all, it was a day well spent learning more about all the initiatives going on out there to support military families.

On October 24th, MOAA will be hosting a Military Spouse Symposium in Coronado, California in conjunction with our Annual Meeting. The topic is: “Leading on the Homefront: the Evolving Role of Spouses in Today’s Military”.  Here is the description of the panel:

Today’s heightened ops tempo and the stressors associated with back to back deployments make it difficult for some to reconcile the needs of their families with the needs of the military.  When the All Volunteer Force was first conceived in the 1970’s, the makeup of the military was quite different than what we see today.  Resources and support programs designed to support service members and their families were engineered centered around life on a military installation.  Today, the demands of the military lifestyle are no less challenging, yet the military demographic shows that more than half of service members are married, males make up between 6 to 10 percent of the miltiary spouse community (depending on service), more than 69 percent of military spouses are either working or seeking work and roughly 70 percent of military families live off of the installation.  With this panel, we want to evaluate the military’s ability to keep up with this cultural shift.  Additionally, given this new set of challenges – how do organizations like MOAA reach out to support military families in the All-Volunteer Force?

We have invited six military spouses from different branches of service as well as the Army Reserve to share their experiences and insights on the programs available to support military spouses and families.  Their background ranges from the spouse of an NCO to spouses of Flag officers.  We’ll have the male spouse perspective represented as well as insights from spouses delivering family support for geographically dispersed populations.  The panel is fairly representative of our military spouse population.  My question is this: if you had an opportunity to share your insights, what would you say about your own experiences?  Where are the gaps in services?  If you had to pick one program to hold up as a gold standard for something that works well (it doesn’t have to be a military program or resource), what would it be?  How do you feel that your role as a spouse has changed in this era of persistent conflict and heightened op tempo?  And finally, if you could ask the panelists a question about spouses and today’s military, what would it be?