Two Rand researchers recently documented the ways in which we'll all be paying the price for veterans' services for some time to come. They call it "the downstream consequences."
From veterans to their caregivers to their children, a series of reports "presents a bleak portrait of the cost of modern war," Rand Corporation's Terri Tanielian and Rajeev Ramchand recently wrote in U.S. News & World Report.
Among their concerns: a study just published in the JAMA Psychiatry for the American Medical Association that showed, for the first time, that the risk for suicide increases once a person leaves active military service.
Rand research released in 2014 shows that military caregivers also face an increased psychological and social burden. Forty percent of Post-9/11 caregivers meet the criteria for depression, compared to 10 percent of non-caregivers, they found. Many vets rely on parents who will age out of the role of caregiver, or they depend on their spouses in fragile young marriages that may be vulnerable to divorce.
"There are an estimated 5.5 million military caregivers in the United States, and the country's overreliance on them poses a threat to the continuity of care for the newest veterans," they warned.
They also pointed to Rand research conducted from 2009 to 2011 that shows that the longer a parent is deployed, the more it affects the emotional health and academic performance of a child.
In looking forward, researchers and policymakers need to learn lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan about the human cost of future military operations. They called for more robust documentation of the experiences of service members between 2004 and 2006, when American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were near their highest.
"We can't truly answer crucial questions like how many deployments is too many and what is the appropriate ratio of time deployed and time spent back home?" the researchers wrote.
