Military Wives Matter

Posted on behalf of guest author, Colleen Lewy. Please visit the Guest Authors page to learn more about Colleen.

I used to know everything…

Approximately three years ago, our research team got a grant to learn how best to help military families through the internet. While we were certainly pleased, we were also a bit surprised. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grants are hard to get these days.  Really hard.  While our team had plenty of experience doing research on mental health and addiction, we didn’t have a lot of experience with military culture. So applying for this grant was a bit of a long shot. But how much difference would that experience make anyway? People are people, right?

Oh how naïve we all were. At first our plan was to teach military family members how to “re-frame” the problems they were up against as a way to ward off depression and/or to figure out how to handle PTSD symptoms. We also said that we’d use pre-existing generic materials to educate military families about mental health conditions like traumatic brain injury (TBI), and that we’d do the whole thing on the internet.  Mind you, the grant we wrote was based on a search of all the other published research done on the military and their families. We learned several things there. First, there is a mental health crisis with post deployed veterans and their families.  As bad as that is, it is only going to get worse.  Also, many veterans and their families don’t have access to VA centers, bases or other forms of support and that many veterans are leery of reporting mental health symptoms to the VA. Based on this information, we charged ahead to build our website.

Because I had one brain cell left, I decided that before we created our website, we should interview military family members before we went any further. And that’s when our real education began…

We managed to interview a bunch of the most amazing people. They were very kind but direct. Here is what we learned. First, veterans’ problems aren’t veteran’s problems. They’re family problems. Second, veterans and their families are incredibly resilient – because they have to be. Third, military life should be viewed as a culture and approaching it from the outside is completely useless.

Based on this feedback along with help from an Iraqi veteran who joined our research team, we revamped our entire project. We took out the generic educational materials and rewrote them with military families in mind. We completely dropped the idea of teaching family members to re-frame their issues because coming up with a different way of seeing what can be a pretty horrifying situation (husband with PTSD, no job, depression, etc.) seems clueless – at best.

We also decided to focus just on military wives and I realize we’re going to get some flak for this. That’s okay. Military husbands are extremely important, but the majority of military spouses are women and we found these two groups have very different needs. We found that with the money we had, we could either do a good job with one group, or we could do a mediocre job with several groups.  With more funding, we’d like to expand the website to cover male spouses, parents, and children.

After three years of struggling to put something reasonable together, our website (www.militarywivesmatter.org) finally went live at the end of May, 2010. It isn’t perfect, there are things I would like to change, but at least we’re up and running.

At this point, we are actively recruiting military wives who have been feeling blue and/or who worry that their husbands may have PTSD. We ask website participants to fill out a questionnaire when they join the study with follow-up surveys after one and three months.  The information collected is completely confidential. We ask for e-mail addresses but not names. Participants also get access to all of the materials we’ve created on a variety of subjects like PTSD, what normal readjustment looks like, the effect of deployment on the kids, coping, etc. We ask for participant feedback on these materials so we can improve them for the future. 

This project has been very humbling. We’ve learned just how little we know and we’re not alone. We have also discovered just how many people really don’t understand the challenges that many veterans and their families face, and this is dangerous. If people don’t know there is a need and how to address it, it likely won’t be addressed. So far, I’ve given presentations to a 4-star general, two U.S. Congressmen and soon a state senator. I am telling all of them that we are doing research to find out what kinds of support actually help military wives and their families. They are interested. And that is a good place to start.

If you are a military wife and have felt sad or worry that your husband may have PTSD, please visit our website (www.militarywivesmatter.org). If you are interested but don’t fit in those categories, drop me a line at milwivesmatter@ohsu.edu. I’d love to hear any suggestions on topics, future research ideas, or just say “hi.”

Thanks for being a military spouse.