VISTAS Counseling Veterans and Military Families

VISTAS Online is an innovative publication produced for ACA by Dr. Garry R. Walz and Dr. Jeanne C. Bleuer of Counseling Outfitters, LLC. Its purpose is to provide a means of capturing the ideas, information and experiences generated by the annual ACA Conference and selected ACA Division Conferences. Papers on a program or practice that has been validated through research or experience may also be submitted. This digital collection of peer-reviewed articles is authored by counselors, for counselors. VISTAS Online contains the full text of over 900 proprietary counseling articles published from 2004 to 2017.



Military Spouses: The Overlooked, Underpaid, and Stressed-Out Casualties of War

Megan Numbers, Linda Osterlund, and Jim Ungvarsky

2011

When the average, non-military American thinks about the United States‟ conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he or she generally associates the stressors and casualties of the wars with the active-duty service members. Rarely the spouses of those soldiers are taken into account when it comes to documenting the costs of military wartime service. There are almost 1.4 million Active Duty service members and 750,320 are married, which is more than half. As well as Active Duty service members, the military has Selected Reserve members, and of the nearly 900,000 Selected Military Reserve population, 426,296 are married as well. For the duration of this paper, the term military spouse is defined as a non-military female spouse due to the majority of spouses being female as well as the majority of the research completed on this topic also denotes military spouse as female. The effects of war are everlasting for military spouses.

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