Deployments Taking a Toll on Military Kids Again

Before troops were sent into Iraq, before they were sent to Afghanistan, long before they were sent to Kuwait, we knew a lot about PTSD but the general public didn't. Once wars are declared over, in the public view, it should be over and done with. They never notice the combat casualties kept coming. They came in the health issues caused by chemicals like Agent Orange. They came with the suicides of veterans. They also came with health issues caused by war in their children as well as suicides of their children because Daddy went to war.

If you take Combat PTSD seriously, the following should be no surprise to you. After all, Australia did a study in 2000 on the relationship of families after war and the veterans sent to fight them. Now some want to bring this hidden price of war out in the open. One thing to keep in mind as you read this, while it has not made a "big" news story, it has been an huge issue for military families going back many generations.

When you think about the stress on adults, you need to think about the stress on kids when they have to adjust to another deployment and time to worry about their parent not coming back.

Deployments Taking a Toll on Military Kids
Posted on 18 November 2011

By Richard Sisk
The War Report
The reality of what happened is nearly unbearable for the two Army wives to speak about, but they said that being silent would be worse.

In June 2009, Daniel, the 12-year-old son of Tricia Sparks Radenz and Lt. Col. Blaine Radenz, hanged himself at Fort Hood, Tex. Last January, Ashton, the 13-year-old son of Ambra Roberts and PFC Luke Roberts, attempted to hang himself at Fort Benning, Ga. He is still undergoing hospital treatment.

“We live this daily,” said Radenz, whose husband has served two tours in Iraq. “We have to get the word out. People have to realize how difficult it is” to keep a military family together through repeated deployments to combat zones, Radenz said.

Ambra Roberts, whose husband has served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and two other advocates met privately today at the Pentagon with Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff and the military’s point man on suicide prevention, to discuss the impact on children of coping with the constant fear that their parents won’t come home.

Numerous studies by the military and government agencies have documented the growing number of suicides among active duty servicemembers and veterans. The latest statistics show that a servicemember commits suicide every 36 hours, and a veteran kills himself or herself every 80 minutes. Military wives are also susceptible to suicide.

But until recently, there has been little research on the effects of the current wars on the children of military parents. Earlier this year, a study by the University of Washington School of Public Health showed that adolescents with a deployed parent were more likely to have suicidal thoughts than the children of civilians.
read more here

This is part of the research done in Australia in 2000.

Morbidity of Vietnam veterans: suicide in Vietnam Veterans' children, supplementary report 1: a study of the health of Australia's Vietnam veteran community

released: 7 Aug 2000 author: Commonwealth Department of Veterans' Affairs and AIHW

Analyses suicide patterns among Vietnam veterans' children highlighting time trends, age and sex distribution, location and method of suicide. It is a supplementary report to Morbidity of Vietnam Veterans: Volume 3 Validation Study which recommended that suicide in veterans' children be further investigated and the result drawn to the attention of the Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service. This report extend the knowledge about the health of Vietnam veterans and their families.

You can read the full report on this link.
Suicide in Vietnam Veterans' children
Methods
In the Validation Study the 111 ‘validated’ suicides were confirmed by matching information provided by the veteran about the child’s name, birth year, sex and State/Territory of residence to the National Death Index (NDI) to confirm that the cause of death was suicide. The NDI contains identifiable information for all deaths occurring in Australia from 1980, as contained on death certificates.
The 230 ‘estimated validated’ number of suicides was based on the assumption that the number of suicides ‘not able to be validated’ should be allocated to either ‘validated’ or ‘not validated’ according to the number in each of these categories. This assumption was based on the overwhelming confirmation of suicides of veterans’ children, where veterans had reported such events in the Morbidity Study. The ‘not able to be validated’ cases refer to reported cases from the Morbidity Study where the veterans did not respond to the Validation Study or were unable to be contacted.
In this report a number of key demographic variables were extracted from the NDI to enable an analysis of the demographic characteristics of those veterans’ children who suicided. The data items used are age at death, sex, birth date, Statistical Local Area of usual residence, and suicide method.
In the following section the suicide rates for veterans’ children are based on the 230 ‘estimated validated’ suicides from Table 1. In the other sections, characteristics are discussed for the 111 ‘validated’ suicides from the Validation Study. These cases represent those children who have been successfully matched to death records and therefore have information available from the NDI. An implicit assumption of this discussion is that the characteristics identified for the 111 ‘validated’ suicides reflect the characteristics of all 230 estimated veterans’ children suicides.