We know from reviewing medical records of Civil War soldiers that, by today's diagnostic criteria, almost 40 percent of soldiers suffered anxiety, depression. or post traumatic stress disorder. Today, one-third of homeless men in America are Vietnam veterans, with the number of homeless vets easily exceeding that of the soldiers actually killed in Vietnam. While no one has studied the impact of war on these soldiers' families, it is not difficult to appreciate that they too suffered the casualties of war.
Since the beginning of the “War on Terror,” over 1.6 million troops have been deployed for a total of 2 million deployments. For the first years of the war 80 percent of the troops in Afghanistan and 40 percent in Iraq were Reserve and National Guard. Almost 50 percent of all the troops were married and a significant percentage had children. About 11 percent of deployed troops are women and they are wounded or dying at a proportional rate to men. The age range of deployed troops is from 18 to 62 years, which means families have grandparents and grandchildren deployed, with often more than one member of the same extended family serving at the same time. Of the 3350 Americans who died in Iraq and Afghanistan through early January 2007, 1588 of them were married. To date, more than 3800 troops have been killed.
The Reserve and National Guard soldiers represent a unique and separate population from the regular military troops. Both their equipment and their training have been less advanced compared to that afforded members of the regular armed forces, even though these citizen soldiers operate in the same war theater and are subjected to the same risks. The Reserve and National Guard and their families are not living on bases but live heterogeneously, spread out across the country, without the centralized support available on military bases where regular military troops and families live, work, and train together. This leaves not only reservists but also their families more vulnerable to the strains of war than their full-time-soldier counterparts. These strains are significant: Increases in deployments have resulted in a 60 percent increase in rates of child abuse; wives have three times the risk of postpartum depression; the suicide rate for veterans is twice that of the civilian population; 31 percent of Marines, 38 percent of soldiers, and 49 percent of Reserve and Guard will experience mental health problems.
Family members may develop “secondary or vicarious trauma,” be more vulnerable to depression and anxiety, and have a higher divorce rate as well as face an increase in alcohol and drug use. And each time a soldier deploys, the stressors become more complex, as the deployments create hosts of psychological, social, economic, and medical issues for family members at home. Harold Blum, in an article on “Holocaust, Trauma Reconstructed” in Psychoanalytic Psychology, states, “The reverberations of traumatic experience have even greater impact when they coalesce in the conjoint or transmitted traumatic experience of the family, and in the wider social surroundings. Because of the immaturity of the ego, children are more susceptible to trauma and require greater support from sustaining objects with whom they identify in order to recover from the traumatic experience with new mastery and adaptation.”
Selma Fraiberg suggested this in her prescient article “Ghosts in the Nursery,” where she highlighted the potential for parents to pass their trauma to their children. And, later, Peter Fonagy reported research that children who experience trauma, if not treated, had a 30 percent chance of transgenerationally repeating that trauma with their children.
The Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists program (SOFAR) was created to address these issues of “secondary or vicarious trauma,” to help develop resilience within families, to work preventively with children, and to engage teachers and pediatricians in workshops to assist them in better supporting these families.
SOFAR began in Massachusetts as a pilot program with the full support of Major General Dennis Laich, the Commanding General of the 94th Regional Readiness Command of the New England Reserves, and has extended through the New England area. Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association are our national partners. Our pamphlet for teachers, parents, and pediatricians, “The ‘SOFAR’ Guide to Help Children and Teens Deal with the Deployment of a Parent in the Military Reserves,” has been distributed by the governor of North Carolina to every school in the state and also distributed to schools throughout the Virgin Islands. We plan to replicate that distribution in every state in the country. Our program is endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and we will be developing workshops for pediatricians and teachers.
SOFAR, soon to be national, is the only psychotherapeutic program working on the critical issues of intergenerational war trauma with soldiers' families today. As psychoanalysts, we are presented with the opportunity to use what we have learned about the complexities of psychic functioning in helping these families. We understand the powerful role separation and trauma play in the development of the individual and the reciprocal impacts of these events on relationships in the family and in the social surround. We must use the tools we possess to address this developing national health care crisis that lies ahead for all members of these families.
It is vital to the future health of these families and our national culture that we undertake this mission. We need your help. Please join with us and volunteer your time at . Our Web site is .
Kenneth I. Reich, Ed.D., is president of the Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England and co-director of the Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists.