First, thank you for inviting me.
I am a graduate of Mount Saint Vincent University in family studies, and I am presently a graduate student in social work at Dalhousie University. I completed my thesis on the experience of the female partners of male military veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. That was defended and passed last summer.
I wanted to study veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder because I have a daughter who struggles with the complications of it and I was aware firsthand of the challenges the family faces in dealing with this. I was struck by the fact that if the parental relationship struggles, I couldn't imagine--and was interested in discovering--what it would be like in an intimate partner relationship.
I interviewed women whose partners had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress so I could understand what they were experiencing and how they were navigating their experience. I had hoped to find how they were resilient, what they were using as coping mechanisms and strategies, so in some way I would be able to duplicate that or, in hearing the story, bring to life the realness of this situation. But what I found was not the resilience I had hoped to find in these families. I heard stories of extraordinary hardship.
One of the most striking things for me was that most of the participants didn't know there were resources available to them; that OSISS has outreach support, and they could get support through Veterans Affairs. There was one family that had been able to access support through the VA. All of the other families did not know they were able to do this. So I was able to put them in touch with that support, which was helpful if they weren't in a rural location. When they were rural families, that access was not possible.
As I said, the devastation I heard about was difficult, but I think in hearing their stories I realized the importance of what these families are going through and how it needs to be more broadly known what they're struggling with.
One of the big things I was struck by was ambiguous loss. These women would talk about grieving the man who went off to war and didn't come back; that a different person had returned with a different personality, a different way of coping, and a different way of being in the family; and how the family had to adapt and adjust around that, and the strain that put on the families. Most of the families didn't survive staying in the same marriage. They weren't able to adjust and find a way of being. So the redefining of the relationship just stretched it beyond their capacity to function.
One of the researchers I studied extensively was Charles Figley. You probably all know of him. He said the most important thing in an intimate relationship where somebody is diagnosed with an operational stress injury or post-traumatic stress is that the intimate partner is able to maintain good boundaries and good self-care. In most cases these women were also responsible for all of the family rearing and the functioning of the family, so maintaining self-care and personal boundaries was not an option. That led to the detriment of the family itself.
I had a few recommendations that came out of the study. The first, of course, was that the intimate partners need to know there are resources available to them. They can't be reliant on the veteran seeking support and bringing home the knowledge that they can receive support. It's just not widely known that they can go through OSISS or get support through the VA.
One of the women desperately wanted to seek out psychotherapy. They lived in a rural town. The only way they could get psychotherapy eventually was because her mother passed away and left them an inheritance. His diagnosis didn't happen before he was released from the military, even though he had been in Bosnia three times. She was working full time to try keep the family functioning. Because he hadn't received his diagnosis until after he was released, he wasn't receiving a disability pension. Financially they could only afford psychotherapy for him once her mother passed away. They used that inheritance for him to receive private therapy. The forms he needed to fill out to access a disability pension sat on the counter for six months because he wasn't able to function well enough to fill them out and get them in.
One of the recommendations I have for these families is that after letting them know there is support available, they need a case worker. They need somebody who can work with them to make sure that the forms are filled out, that they know there is access to support, and that these things are out there. The sooner they can get support, the less entrenched in the family system this will become, and the less likely it will lead to the devastation of the family.
A whole other area that needs to be explored is the children who are dealing with parents who are suffering with this complication. It changes everything in the family. It is not and was not a happy story. There were no happy endings. There were families dealing with significant loss on all levels.
There were two families. One was still struggling to find a new balance; the other one had found it. They had been married for a long time before he developed PTSD, and I think for her it was coming to an acceptance of the new person who was. She said she was able to fall in love with the new man, but the person she married was no longer. I don't think we can undervalue that loss, that grief, of the person who was and the person they became.
On family support, I'm not sure how you navigate it or make these families aware of the warning signs without becoming hyper-vigilant and leading to the possibility of the lay person misdiagnosing their partner as having PTSD when they're just having a bad day or a bad week. There needs to be more awareness and less stigma around mental illness in the military and in society in general, of course. But in the research I did it seemed to be specifically difficult for these men who went away.
One woman said, “If he had come back missing a leg he would have been seen as a hero, but because he came back unable to come out of his bedroom for three days at time, everybody just thinks there's something wrong with him, that he just needs to suck it up.” That is sad, because the injury is as valid as losing a leg or a limb.
We need to listen to the families express what they need. All families are individual, just like we are, and they need to know that the resources are there. But they all had specific needs, depending on the ages of the children and whether the partner had been diagnosed before he left the military. A lot of them needed to go through to get that diagnosis.
One family actually had to sue to get the medical records. The husband had been diagnosed before he left the military but was never told. They only found out that he had been diagnosed after they sued to get his medical records, where it had been documented. That made a difficult situation even more difficult for them.
That's all I have to say for now.