Abstract
The enduring nature of the Global War on Terrorism has created a generation of active duty service members and recently retired veterans who spent the majority of their careers training and deploying to combat. Their long-term persistent service heightens the likelihood of symptoms of PTSD, moral distress, or moral injury (Frankfurt & Frazier, 2016) and the enduring nature of the conflicts means many remained undertreated or undiagnosed for extensive periods of time (Conard & Sauls, 2014). In the past decade, expansive research has begun to study the psychological implications of these extensive conflicts on service members and has begun to offer ways to mitigate and treat this generation. However, the research and institutional and financial support are often given to the active duty service member or veteran despite the knowledge that the active duty service member’s combat service has extensive mental health impacts on the spouse caregiver and other family members. While research and resources for spousal caregivers and family members are becoming more frequent, this article argues the need for additional resources for spouse caregivers of active duty service members or recently retired service members who have served primarily in combat-related positions and who have cases of undiagnosed, underdiagnosed, or untreated cases of PTSD or moral distress or injury after several decades of conflicts. Implementing, and providing adequate awareness of, additional institutional and individual support services for the spousal caregiver can help to heal the family unit more effectively.
Highlights
In the wake of the Global War on Terrorism, there is a generation of active duty service members and recently retired veterans who spent the better part of the last two decades consistently, persistently deployed and engaged in combat related labor or in training and preparing for deployments to combat zones (Turse, 2018)
In 2010, President Obama implemented the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act with the intention to allow for financial or partial financial compensation of provisions of care for an injured veteran to include access to educational resources, support services, counseling, and respite care (Sherman, Perlick, & Straits-Troster, 2012). While this initiative was an important step towards ensuring spouse caregivers received adequate support, the concern to keep in mind is that service members who remained active duty could not receive Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits, which was a requirement of the 2010 Act (Link & Palinkas, 2013)
It means the organization has to choose who receives the funding based on need, which often goes towards cases of physical injury or those who are the most severely injured in PTSD cases with the funding focused on the service member rather than support and resources for the spouse caregiver (Sherman, Perlick, & Straits-Troster, 2012)
Summary
The enduring nature of the Global War on Terrorism has created a generation of active duty service members and recently retired veterans who spent the majority of their careers training and deploying to combat. It needs to be taken into consideration that many of these active duty combat service members have not stopped deploying, even if deployments have slowed down to some extent, as there have continued to be missions and conflicts in other areas of concern (Turse, 2018) All of this means that PTSD related injuries that remain undiagnosed or underdiagnosed and undertreated will continue to impact service members, veterans, and their families into the several decades. This is especially true because the active duty service member and family have not had the ability to create a normal life pattern due to the constant interruptions with the training cycles and deployments. There is the need for additional resources in order to heal the entire family unit impacted by wartime conflicts (Sherman, Perlick, & Straits-Troster, 2012; Link & Palinkas, 2013)
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