UCLA FOCUS to help Navy Families

Navy families to get help dealing with deployment
UCLA teams with military to provide support services
By Rachel McGrath
Correspondent
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Military families stationed at Naval Base Ventura County will be given more support services to deal with the emotional and psychological effects of long-term deployment and combat readiness, officials said.

Beginning in September, a three-person team specializing in "resiliency-building" will be based at the chaplains' offices at Port Hueneme in what officials describe as "a unique partnership" between academics at UCLA and the military.

"We started getting lots of questions from military mental health leadership and the then-director of psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2003," said Dr. Patricia Lester, director of the FOCUS project which is based at the Semel Institute at UCLA. "It was thought that some lessons we'd learned in other contexts could help inform the military experience."

Lester, a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry, developed a customized program in response to the unique deployment experiences of military personnel since the start of the war on terror, and the program was piloted at Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base, during 2004 and 2005.

"We want to give families the tools early on, when the stress is moderate, to be able to address specific questions, such as how to prepare for a parent's deployment and how to deal with a parent who has post-traumatic stress issues," Lester said.

For example, Lester said, the FOCUS program, which stands for Families OverComing Under Stress, is designed to help children understand and cope with a parent who has returned from active duty and has problems readjusting to family life, and help family members communicate with each other about why a parent is very sad or jumpy or afraid of loud noises and how to deal with that.

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