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A family member or support person at home plays a key role as part of the treatment plan for a service member or veteran. An adjunct in their loved one’s care, the family member collaborates with the team of providers to help their loved one follow through with appointments, medications, and health regimens. They often serve as the more impartial eyes and ears to their loved one’s challenges and improvements.

The Road Home Program has had great success treating both female and male survivors of military sexual trauma. Through cognitive processing therapy and other therapies like mindfulness and therapeutic arts—working with providers and alongside peers who have had similar experiences—survivors of military sexual trauma can transform their feelings of powerlessness into a stronger sense of self.

Part of Rush University Medical Center’s efforts around helping people with trauma and/or PTSD is working with the community—whether screening children more effectively during pediatric visits, working with families, or advising schools. Ongoing adverse events in inner city communities can cause young children, adolescents, and adults to experience trauma and PTSD, but these issues are treatable with professional interventions.

Two-week intensive outpatient programs that implement a comprehensive, holistic approach to treatment, The Road Home Program includes two treatment arms for veterans and their families—one for veterans who experience battlefield PTSD, the other for survivors of military sexual trauma. Their data reveal high success rates during the program and in the long-term, post-program.

What is most important about PTSD is getting the needed help. PTSD can spiral into depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues that can lead to one’s inability to work or maintain connections with friends and family. Treatment should be sovereign.

After intensive treatment programs like Home Base, often veterans and service members need to rely on their local providers who have not been specifically trained to work with people who have military-related TBI and/or PTSD. But there are lots of resources out there, like Home Base, that can help civilian providers learn more to successfully understand and help this large, unique population in their cities and towns.

Often feelings of lost connection with family members—whether with a spouse, children, parents, or siblings—is what finally catalyzes a veteran or service member to seek treatment for TBI and/or PTSD. For example, a Special Ops veteran who had deployed 10 times during a 35-year military career finally sought treatment through the Home Base program because his child told his wife that he was afraid of him. He did not want the effects of TBI and/or PTSD to create irreparable damage to his whole, multigenerational family.

Dr. Mary Alexis Iaccarino tells the story of a service member who sent her team a note of thanks along with a photo of himself attending his daughter’s graduation. Before attending the Home Base program as well as a special brain health and trauma program for Special Operations Forces, he could never have imagined being in a crowd filled with noises and lights. For him, attending the graduation was a huge win; because of treatment he was able to participate in a big family moment.

Researchers and doctors are learning more about how blast injuries, especially if repetitive and sustained close together, can affect the brain far more significantly than a singular blow to the head as from football, boxing, or a car crash. When treating veterans and service members, clinicians in the Home Base program start by taking an in-depth TBI history starting from childhood to the present. The more they understand the mechanism, frequency, and interval between any sustained injuries, the more pointed their treatment can be.

TBI is a multi-faceted injury that can present physically through headaches, balance, hearing, or vision problems; psychologically through depression or post-traumatic stress; cognitively through memory and attention issues; or all or a combination of these “buckets.” Home Base is a two-week intensive program for veterans and service members that serves as part of their journey to recovery. After the two weeks, case managers help their clients set up the necessary care and services they need in their community and follow their progress.

Dr. Iaccarino shares how suffering a spine injury as a teenager sparked her passion for helping others with brain injury using neurological rehabilitation and recovery, especially veterans and military service members.

In our country—and around the world—we are witnessing a rise in suicide, drug dependency, and poor access to physical and mental health services. Programs like Wounded Warrior Project feel it is their responsibility to translate their best practices offered to veterans and service members for treatment and rehabilitation for these conditions to the entire country and world of civilians.