Depression risk higher for spouses of deployed - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Depression risk higher for spouses of deployed

Wives of soldiers sent to war suffered significantly higher rates of mental health issues than those whose husbands stayed home, according to the largest study ever done on the emotional impact of war on Army wives.

Those rates were higher among wives whose husbands deployed longer than 11 months, according to findings that will be published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

For example, wives of soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan between one and 11 months had an 18 percent higher rate of suffering from depression than those whose husbands did not go to war, the study shows. When soldiers were deployed 11 months or longer, their wives had a 24 percent higher rate of depression.

The study looked at more than 250,000 Army wives, of which two-thirds had husbands who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2006.

“Mental health effects of current operations are extending beyond soldiers and into their immediate families,” the study says.

“There’s a very clear relationship between deployment and these mental health diagnoses in these women,” said Alyssa Mansfield, an epidemiologist with the research organization RTI International and the study’s lead author. “We find that these women are experiencing greater mental health problems and there’s a need for services for them.”

The study shows again “that when a service member deploys, the entire family deploys,” said Air Force Maj. April Cunningham, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

She identified several programs designed to help families including Military OneSource, a hotline — 800-342-9647 — and Web-based counseling program.

The study most likely underestimates the mental impact of deployments on wives, Cunningham and Mansfield said, in part because of a military stigma over seeking mental health care.

“We know there’s a stigma,” Deborah Mullen, wife of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen, said at a suicide conference Wednesday. “Spouses tell me all the time that they would like to get mental health assistance, but they really believe ... it will have a negative impact on their spouse’s military career.”

The results of the Journal study reflect findings in a RAND Corp. study of military children, said Joyce Raezer, director of the National Military Family Association, which sponsored the RAND study. It found that kids of deployed parents suffer more emotional issues, particularly if separations are long or the parent at home is troubled, the study says.

“What worries me [is that] ... kids do worse when Mom does worse,” Raezer said. “So if spouses are more likely to need mental health services as deployment times increase, then their kids are more at risk.”

Researchers in the Journal study identified how many additional cases of mental health diagnoses among wives were generated by the deployments of their husbands, findings that they said could help the Pentagon budget for health resources.

“We may need to devote more services for the prevention of some of these problems,” Mansfield said.