Military wives often try not to complain, but a large-scale study published today suggests that they have a right to, citing elevated rates of depression, sleep disorders, anxiety and other mental-health problems among women whose husbands were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The study looked at electronic medical data for more than 250,000 of the nearly 300,000 women whose active-duty husbands were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan from 2003 to 2006. It appears in the New England Journal of Medicine and was Alyssa J. Mansfield's doctoral dissertation at UNC-Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health.
"The results that we found won't come as a surprise toArmy leaders," said Mansfield, who is now a researcher at RTI International. "It's probably something they have assumed. But it's an opportunity to kind of quantify what's going on."
The study found that 36.6percent of women whose husbands had deployed had at least one mental-health diagnosis, compared with 30.5 percent of women whose husbands had not deployed.
The military has long been aware that the stress of combat deployment can have lasting effects on troops, and has developed programs to help before, during and after they are sent to war. With the majority of its service members married, the military has extended the reach of its programs in recent years to spouses and children, reasoning that a healthier family makes a stronger soldier.
"Besides fear for the safety of their loved ones, spouses of deployed personnel often face challenges of maintaining a household, coping as a single parent and experiencing marital strain due to a deployment-induced separation of an uncertain duration," the study says.
Patti Katter experienced all of that while her husband, in the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, was in Iraq from August 2006 until October 2007. The first couple of months weren't so bad, but in November the unit lost its first soldier. After that, the fatalities and injuries mounted at a relentless pace - so many she lost count.
"That was kind of the point where it started getting nerve-wracking," Katter said. "I would say I stayed strong. I stayed pretty sane. But I know a lot of marriages ended in divorce after the deployment."
Katter's husband was injured during the deployment and is recovering.
While the Army relies heavily on family readiness groups to support spouses and families while soldiers are deployed, Katter felt more comforted by her church. Eventually, she started Christian Military Wives, a faith-based support group.
For the study, Mansfield and other researchers worked with the medical records of women whose husbands had been on active duty for at least five years as of Jan. 1, 2007. Researchers did not include military husbands in the study for statistical reasons. The study did not include members of the reserves or the National Guard.
The results are likely conservative, Mansfield said, and an even larger percentage of women probably have experienced mental-health issues connected to their husbands' wartime service.
