The Need for Child Mental Health Services Within a Department of Defense Setting

Abstract

In 2007, the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Military Deployment Services for Youth, Families and Service Members identified the need for further research to determine how to serve the psychological needs of military members’ families. While that document covers many important areas, this brief paper is intended to specifically focus on the needs for children of military members and provide some data or justification to support the allocation of resources for additional training, services and child psychology research efforts. Multiple deployments to warzones over the past decade have strained service members and their families (Hoge, Terhakopian, Castro, Messer, & Engel, 2007; Hoge et al., 2004; Hoge et al., 2008; James, 2008). While much research has been and continues to be conducted to evaluate the direct effects on service members themselves, little empirical randomized research exists to evaluate the effects of deployments on service members’ children. However, a group of researchers from the Rand Corporation (Chandra et al., 2010) did conduct a well designed phone survey with boys and girls (ages 11–17) and a sample of 1,500. The findings of Chandra et al. suggested that children of deployed service members experienced significantly greater ‘‘challenges’’ during and post deployment, including more ‘‘school, family and peer related difficulties with parental deployment.’’ Chandra et al., also found that ‘‘length of parental deployment and poorer non-deployed caregiver mental health were significantly associated with a greater number of challenges for children both during deployment and deployed-parent reintegration (p. 16).’’ Despite the presence of numerous helpful resources for addressing the concerns of parents and children regarding military deployments, there appears to be a lack of empirically supported therapies to help children who need services that are specifically a result of a parent’s military deployment or service. A growing number of individuals are studying how deployment affects the children of military personnel, yet the gap in proven therapies still exists.