By Christine Leccese
In honor of May as Mental Health Month, the Military Pathways® team has a fantastic month planned for military families on our blog. This month, our blog will focus on mental health resources and programs for military families. We’ll cover a wide range of important topics and we also have a good selection of expert guest bloggers. In this month’s blog, you will hear from the National Military Family Association, Military 1Click, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, some military family therapists, and other experts.
Military families face unique issues and research shows they are extremely resilient. However, during times of deployment, children in military families experience higher rates of stress than their civilian counterparts. And, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the wives of army soldiers who had spouses deployed suffered more mental health diagnoses than those army wives whose husbands were not deployed.
Military Pathways has a vast array of materials available to military families in the learning and resources section of our website, as well as in the many family resiliency kits we provide to Family Readiness Group Leaders. We’ll be talking about our kits later in the month, too.
So, during the month of May, try to think about the mental health needs of your whole family, not just the one who is an active duty service member or veteran. Feel free to contact me at CLeccese@mentalhealthscreening.org with any ideas or thoughts on this topic or what you want to see on our blog.
Christine Leccese is the communications and marketing manager at Military Pathways.
Thank you for the support you give to our military families. It makes it easier to perform our duties in the military when we know that there are programs for our spouses and children.