This story, written by Sarah Lazare at AlJazeera America, is an outstanding look at how the military is not equipped to deal with the families of soldiers suffering from PTSD (and make the point that it can't keep up with soldiers' needs, either). The piece mostly focuses on spouses; it briefly mentions the effects on children. But it's clear that the military is not taking a whole-family approach to helping soldiers with PTSD. The good news, which we linked to yesterday, was that the US Department of Defense is doing two "rapid reviews": one of child abuse and neglect, the other of domestic and intimate partner violence.
Army wife Melissa Bourgeois hit her breaking point five years ago when she was living at a U.S. military base in Vicenza, Italy, with her husband, Eric, an infantryman. Eric was just back from a harrowing second deployment to Afghanistan marked by frequent firefights. Filled with an uncontrollable rage, he spent his nights self-medicating at bars with his war buddies.
Eric's anger toward his family had become explosive, and he regularly punched doors, furniture and even a concrete wall that left his hand injured. Melissa, 25 at the time, with their two small children, felt isolated in a new country where she barely spoke the language. She needed to talk to someone about her situation, but she said each time she sought mental-health care on the base, she was given Valium and sent away.
In October 2008, Eric backed Melissa into a corner and started shouting at her in front of the children, the smell of alcohol heavy on his breath. "I was hysterical, screaming," she said. Desperate, she called a friend, who reported him to the military police for domestic abuse. The commanding officer of Eric's company held him in the barracks for 72 hours before releasing him. When Melissa went to her husband's platoon sergeant for help, he told her that if she was so unhappy, maybe he should just send her back home. Soon after that, Eric said, the platoon sergeant told him, "Keep your wife in line."
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/13/the-military-s-hiddenhealthcrisis.html
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