Articles in this section:
UCLA-NCTSN Collaboration on Serving Military Families
New NCTSN Steering Committee Roster
Six States Receive Hurricane Katrina Crisis Counseling Assistance

Serving Military Families (Cont.)

At Camp Pendleton Marine Base and the San Diego Naval Medical Center in California, Lester and Saltzman have developed and piloted a family-based program to strengthen military families who have experienced a wartime deployment.  Designed in collaboration with William Beardslee, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, this pioneering program is designed to help military families restore, maintain, and promote positive adaptation in the face of parental wartime duty and combat-related stress. It has been especially well received at Camp Pendleton, which has sustained more deaths and casualties related to operations in Iraq than any other military base in the United States.

To help foster opportunities for collaboration and to develop a national network of military child mental health providers to address the needs of children and families when a parent goes to war, the UCLA- NCTSN team will provide a plenary presentation at the upcoming All Network Meeting.  The topic of the presentation will be “The Impact of Wartime Deployment, Injury and Death on Military Children and Families: Current Needs and Programmatic Innovations.”

This presentation will provide the latest data and an inside view of the impact and challenges experienced by military children and families enduring parental deployments to Iraq.

The issues will be broadly framed by Jean Silvernail, director of the Military Child in Transition and

Deployment Program at the Department of Defense.  In-depth presentations on child and family outcomes related to parental injury, emotional impairment, and death will be provided by Col. Steve Cozza, chief of the  Department of Psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, and Lt. Commander James Reeves, director of Child Services at Navy Medical Center in San Diego.  They will also describe the status of child, parent and family mental health services across military branches and systems of care, highlighting current shortfalls and areas of need, as well as recent programmatic breakthroughs. Saltzman and Lester will describe their program, a pioneering family-based intervention currently being piloted by Network members with the Marines.  Finally, Silvernail and Cozza will offer recommendations for collaborative initiatives between military providers and members of the NCTSN.

Lester and Saltzman have also been funded by the National Institute for Child and Human Development to conduct an assessment of children and parents affected by a military parent’s current or recent wartime deployment to lay the foundation for further intervention adaptation.

Ongoing efforts at Camp Pendleton have extended to numerous trainings of school, mental health, and medical staff on issues related to the impact and treatment of children experiencing wartime separation, parental traumatic exposure, and parental death.