United States army wives whose husbands have been deployed have a higher percentage of mental health issues than husbands who have not been shipped overseas.
A
study published in New England Journal of Medicine. says that mental health issues are increased among the wives of deployed troops by a significant rate.
Researchers studied 250,000 Army wives. Two-thirds of the women in the study had spouses that had been deployed between 2003 and 2006. More than 36 percent of women with deployed husbands had at least one mental health diagnosis. That risk factor was compared to the 30.5 percent of wives with spouses not deployed who had mental health issues.
Wives whose husbands have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for periods of one to 11 months have an 18 percent probability higher than those wives whose husband have not been deployed of suffering from depression.
Top News quotes Alyssa Mansfield, the lead author of the study:
“There's a very clear relationship between deployment and these mental health diagnoses in these women, we find that these women are experiencing greater mental health problems and there's a need for services for them.”
Some wives do not seek help for their issues believing that it would affect their husbands military career.
Fay Observer reports:
"The majority of active-duty soldiers are married, so we need to pay attention to the needs of their families, both short and long term," Mansfield said.
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