Dr. Marjorie Weinstock is the Lead, Military Families & CBT for Depression at the Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP) at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. This week I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit down with her to discuss her background and ask her a variety of questions about military life and its impact on families.
From practical experience, (as discussed in a previous blog entry: Staff Voices: Integrating Deployment Experiences - The Process Group as a Critical Resource ), I am a staunch advocate for use of the process group format as an exceedingly useful resource and/or addition to the individual psychotherapy/psychopharmological treatment protocol for Service members who have deployed. Today I’d like to continue to expand upon my support of this treatment avenue. More specifically, I would like to report an observation as well as present a challenge to the community of mental health providers who serve the needs of military men and women who have deployed.
Limited research has focused on parents of Service members despite the millions of mothers and fathers who wear these shoes. However, Worthen, Moos and Ahern (2012) take a step to fill this gap by shedding light on the experiences of 11 returned Veterans aged 22-52 living with their parents after separating from the military in California. The authors argue for the importance of this research, noting that 27% of Veterans 30 years of age or younger currently live with their parents in California, and an even larger percentage lives with them for some period of time after leaving the military. Also, according to these researchers, Veterans who navigate the waters of returning to live with their parents often face more rocky transitions than their non-Veteran counterparts because they are leaving the structure and purpose of the military and may have experienced combat or other trauma.
The CDP staff is still catching up on things backlog from the holiday last week.
Since President Obama declared November 2013 to be Military Families Month, it seemed appropriate to write about military families. My professional interest in military families began when I married my active duty Navy husband in 2005. When I did my first literature review on military families, I was quite surprised by the size of the body of literature, much of which was quite outdated. While the research literature on military families and children is still limited, it has grown significantly since then.