Spotlight on Students: Military BRATs and Mental Health

The following is a post written by a student, Jeremy Morin.  This post highlights his work that he completed as part of his requirements in Ant 411: Culture Areas of the World.  Students have the opportunity to explore material through their own research.  Please show your appreciation for his work through the comments.

By Jeremy Morin

            One question I have after watching the movie on Tuesday and Thursday is what type of mental issues do military brats deal with when growing up the ways that they do?  My father was a military brat.  He was born in Soul, Korea and after that he lived in the Philippines, Puerto Ricco, and Guam.  And after getting out of high school he, like some of the army brats in the movie, joined the army and spent a lot of time in Germany on the East/West German border.

            My dad doesn’t have any notable issues like PTSD of very obvious depression, but I have always wondered if there were any internal problems that he was facing that he never told me about.  That’s what got me thinking after seeing the movie.  According to Dr. Michael Faran, a retired colonel and psychiatrist, says that these kids “experience more anxiety, there's an increase in depression and anxiety and there can also be a decrease in academic performance” (Collins).  He then later states that none of what they suffer from makes them mentally ill, but it does mean that they are heavily depressed.  He also says that just because they suffer from all these things, they can surprisingly do well without these things bothering them all too much.

            Dr. Faran later says that the parents think that these issues would eventually go away, until they later realize that everything that their kids were dealing with would become really large problems.  The child may have to deal with high anxiety, which having it personally I can say is not something you want to deal with.  Or depression, the child could have extreme depression and possibly want to kill themselves over the fact that they think they can never reach their parents goals for them.  Either way; if the parents of military brats don’t do something to help their kids with these types of issues early, it can lead to extreme problems for the kid to face once they get older.

            Another article by the National Center for Children in Poverty says that children of military members could lash out in anger, not be able to express why they are angry, and even have their grads fall dramatically without warning. The NCCP did a study, and out of all the military kids they studied about 37% of them said they were constantly worried about the health and well-being of their deployed caretaker.  It even says that 1 in every 5 children had an extremely hard time coping with separation of the deployed parents or caretaker.

            These are all extremely important problems that need to be dealt with when it comes to military children, because if it isn’t then there will be a possibility of extreme problems in that child’s future.  My father may not have PTSD, high anxiety, or extreme depression; but after reading these articles and seeing the movie I now understand more about why he is the way he is.  I can also see that some of the way he was raised flowed over onto me, but those are only the good qualities like survival.  Either way, I understand more now than I did before.

Sources:

Collins, Elizabeth M. “Experts Explain Mental State of Military Children.” Www.army.mil, U.S.

Army, 1 May

2015, www.army.mil/article/147786/experts_explain_mental_state_of_military_children.

Sogomonyan, Fianna, and Janice L. Cooper. “Also of Interest.” NCCP | Trauma Faced by

Children of Military Families, 4 May 2010, www.nccp.org/publications/pub_938.html.