Parental wartime deployment and the use of mental health services among young military children.

Recent study reports have described the health and mental health (MH) issues of US servicemembers involved inwartime deployments,1,2 including the toll on American lives. From October 2001 through May 2010, there have been 5473 American casualties and 38 076wounded in action.3 A recent study identified significant stress and MH problems in US Army wives whose husbands experienced deployments.4 Evidence from that study, and a study of school-aged children,5 suggests cumulative stress from subsequent wartime deployments for athome parents and their children, and there are potential negative lifetime effects. Despite these challenges, the vast majority of US military children manifest considerable resilience. In fact, a colleague of mine genuinely refers to military families as “our heroes at home.” In this issue of Pediatrics, Lieutenant Commander Gorman et al6 address parental wartime deployment and the use of MH services among military children aged 3 to 8 years. It is one of the first studies to capture data from a large number of military children representing multiple active-duty (AD) services during a period of high-intensity parental deployments. The authors should be commended for their ability to extricate important pediatric needs from a system of complex, multipurpose electronic resources. By using comprehensive claims data, they report increased outpatient visits for anxiety, behavioral, and stress disorders in 3to 8-year-old children of deployed parents compared with nondeployed parents. More claims were filed for families in which the children were older, AD parents were married, and the deployed parent was the father.