Soldiers' children are war victims, too

Soldiers' children are war victims, too
By Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje - Express-News

War's effect on mental health
900,000 troops with children have deployed to war since 2001.
Six out of 10 military parents say their children have increased anxiety when a parent is sent to war.
Children of U.S. troops sought outpatient mental-health care 2 million times in 2008, double the number at the start of the Iraq war.
From 2007 to 2008, some 20 percent more children of active duty troops were hospitalized for mental-health care.

Sitting outside a Starbucks on a recent sunny morning, Gabriella Lane, 8, clutches a well-worn blanket. She's a serious, unsmiling little girl with a patriotic red, white and blue barrette in her hair.

The blanket goes everywhere with her, said her mother: It's her security talisman, the comforting fabric she holds onto in an unsure, sometimes frightening world.

At the tender age of 8, Gabriella has already experienced grown-up fears and concerns: Three times she has seen her beloved father, a combat medic, go off to war.

His latest deployment was a yearlong stint in Afghanistan, and Gabriella and her brother, Alvaro, worried every day that the horrible things happening on the news would befall him. On trips to see their doctor at Brooke Army Medical Center, they would see the wounded and limbless soldiers and imagine their dad coming back mutilated or, worse, not coming back at all.

Gabriella took her father's deployment the hardest. Already an anxious child, her stress level "really went off the charts" after her dad left for Afghanistan, said mother Fabiola Lane.

"We could not go out in public, especially crowded places like movies or restaurants," Lane said. "She started sweating and plucking out her hair and her eyebrows. She scratched herself until she brought blood. We could not travel more than an hour or she would vomit. She started coming into my bed at night every half hour, just crying and saying she missed her father."

Gabriella sees a psychiatrist once a week and is on medication for anxiety. She is hardly alone as she struggles to cope with her father's deployment. According to a recent Pentagon study, children of U.S. military troops sought outpatient mental health care 2 million times last year, double the number at the start of the Iraq war. There also was a disturbing upswing in the number of military children hospitalized for mental-health troubles.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, inpatient visits among military children have mushroomed by 50 percent.
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