Military deployments tied to teens' depression

Adolescents who experience the deployment of a family member in the U.S. military may face an increased risk of depression, suggests a new study.

Ninth- and eleventh-grade students in California public schools with two or more deployment experiences over the past decade were 56 percent more likely to feel sad or hopeless compared with their non-military-family peers, the researchers found.

The same kids were 34 percent more likely to have suicidal thoughts.

The study is one of very few that compare students from military families to their non-military peers, said Julie Cederbaum, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led the study.

"One of the goals of our research was to highlight kids' experiences, which have been unintentionally ignored in the past," Cederbaum told Reuters Health.

Past research in this area has mostly been conducted in clinical settings or at summer camps designed specifically for military families, Cederbaum and her colleagues write in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Less than one percent of the U.S. population has been on active duty at any point in time since the attacks of September 11, 2001, according to the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

Kids in military families may feel isolated with so few peers who can share and understand their experiences, Cederbaum's team points out in their report.

For their study, the researchers tacked on an extra questionnaire to a statewide survey administered every two years to public schools in California. The researchers chose to give the military questionnaire to eight public school districts in the southern part of the state. Nearly half of all respondents were Hispanic, followed by white, mixed race, Asian and black, and students could complete the paper-and-pencil survey in English or Spanish.

Of the 14,300 students surveyed, less than 14 percent reported having a connection with the military.

For their deployment analysis, the researchers narrowed their focus to the ninth and eleventh grades only, which included about 9,300 students from both military and non-military families.

The researchers found that kids with a family member in the military had higher rates of depression, hopelessness and suicidal thoughts than non-military peers.

When they adjusted for a variety of factors, it turned out that the differences seemed to be largely driven by the number of deployments kids experienced.

Comparing just the teens with military connections, they found those with one deployment in the family were 15 percent more likely to feel depressed than kids with no deployment experiences, and those with two or more deployments were 41 percent more likely to report symptoms of depression..