DCoE Talks Military Families Initiatives with International Audience

By Robyn Mincher, DCoE Strategic Communications

Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE) psychological health subject matter experts gathered this week to prepare for an upcoming International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) meeting—collaborating with top international subject matter experts to explore potential military family psychological health initiatives.

“Our focus was to understand and reduce leadership barriers to implement evidence-based mental health care for military families and indentify gaps in current programs to provide the best care to them,” said Dr. Kate McGraw, DCoE Psychological Health Clinical Standards of Care directorate acting deputy director.

U.S. Public Health Service Capt. Rita Shapiro, DCoE Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Standards of Care directorate, and Army Capt. Dayami Liebenguth, DCoE clinical psychologist, attended the meeting. Also present were Judith Dekle, from the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Community and Family Policy, and three military family experts from international organizations, communicating remotely.

“Dr. Alan Hayes, director of the Australian Institute of Family Services, was interested in strengthening and expanding their use of social media to disseminate findings and tools,” said McGraw. “They are just starting to explore this. We offered to share our knowledge and skills with them.”

Presentations about social media efforts for the Real Warriors Campaign and DCoE fueled discussions making outreach via social media a pivotal topic.

“Without the capability of this type of communication, the rest of the world might not see what products, great concepts and innovative practices DCoE is developing,” Liebenguth said.

Another topic discussed was the co-occurring concerns associated with traumatic brain injury and how to educate families.

“Many times service members don’t realize they had a concussion, and then all of a sudden, they might experience sudden bursts of anger or forgetfulness,” Shapiro said. “A military wife might say ‘my husband is a different person.’ The idea behind this [discussion] is that by teaching families these signs and resources, they can bring a service member back to the military system for proper diagnosis and treatment.”

Denkle said these meetings are key to advancing military family health.

“We want to promote the awareness that military families are doing fairly well in terms of mental health, but they are under stress,” she said. “The answer is not to wait, but to intervene early in a non-threatening, non-stigmatizing way so that families feel comfortable when seeking help and know that it’s normal to need support along the way.”

The IIMHL “Leadership Exchange and Networking” meeting, taking place in San Francisco this week, brings together international leaders in psychological health. The meeting aims to develop and continue a dialogue in the mental health community across a wide spectrum of medical areas, including a new topic this year: military families.