Authors
P Lester, SM MacDermid, D Riggs, R Blair Everson, CR Figley
Pages
481
Description
Due to the US military involvement in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) for more than a decade, it is highly likely that civilian social workers will encounter military or veteran connected families seeking assistance from community mental health or family service agencies, especially given that military and government systems of care (eg, Veterans Administration) may not be able to meet the demand for services. Social workers without exposure or having little knowledge of the military or veteran population may benefit from understanding military culture and lifestyle, as well as current issues facing military connected families, in order to provide comprehensive and informed services for this population (Savitsky, Illingworth, & DuLaney, 2009). Thus the objective of this chapter is to inform social workers on the unique strengths and challenges of military connected families and ways to serve them. Military connected families are often considered resilient in the face of experiencing unique stressors such as frequent geographic relocations, service member deployments and family separations, postdeployment adjustment, and family crises resulting from posttraumatic stress disorder or other injuries incurred by the service member. However, before we explore associated stressors as well as family strengths, military family-related demographics will be provided first, followed by a bird’s eye view of military culture and lifestyle, as a way of background and orientation for the reader. As of 2011, only 37% of military families lived on a military installation with the remaining 63% living among 4,000 communities nationwide (US Department of Defense [DoD …
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