The CDP's weekly research update contains the latest news, journal articles and useful links from around the web. Some of this week's topics include:
• Family-Centered Care for Military and Veteran Families Affected by Combat Injury.
• Long-Term Trajectories and Service Needs for Military Families.
• The Association of Sleep Duration, Mental Health, and Health Risk Behaviors among U.S. Afghanistan/Iraq Era Veterans.
Here in the Pacific Region, I am aware of what appears to be taking place across the Army, a great commitment and rapid transition toward building Embedded Behavioral Health (EBH) teams. I noticed Service Members were no longer blindly picking and choosing a mental health provider. Instead, there are now teams including psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and case managers assigned to a specific battalion, creating a more accessible pathway toward treatment.
The percentages, respectively, of homeless female veterans and homeless male veterans who have experienced military sexual trauma (MST), according to "a cross-sectional study of 126,598 homeless Veterans who used VHA outpatient care in fiscal year 2010," recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
In a previous blog entry (entitled “New Experiences, New Perspectives - Improving Therapy Outcomes”), I discussed the clinical utility of having Service Members who have deployed work to integrate their deployment-related experiences into the self, versus suppressing and/or avoiding them. My discussion focused more or less on what might be accomplished in the individual psychotherapy situation. In this entry, I will briefly argue for its use in group psychotherapy, as I have seen improvements (i.e., a decrease in symptom presentation) in individuals’ general mood and dispositions related to their deployment experiences.
The number of same-sex couples "in the active-duty force," according to a recent Army Times article, Supreme Court strikes down DOMA. The Supreme Court's June 26 decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act clears the way for married same-sex servicemember partners to access more than 100 different military benefits currently available to married couples, including military health care coverage, on-base housing, paying for the spouse who accompanies a military member "on a permanent change of station move."