Online community launched to help families affected by PTSD

Nov 11 2009

Since the Vietnam Era, the American psychiatric community has recognized the returning war veterans’ affliction of what is now commonly known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

While there has been much research and advancements in the treatment of PTSD, the focus has always been on the veterans themselves. What has never been addressed or understood, until now, is how the stress from distant battlefields has affected the families of veterans.

Today – Veterans’ Day – the first organization to support warfare’s often invisible victims has launched an online community, www.veteranschildren.com. Denver-based Veterans’ Children is dedicated to exploring the trans-generational consequences of living with the trauma of war and serves as a resource center and support group for thousands of individuals and families affected by PTSD.

“Veterans’ Children’s mission is to heal, inform and serve as a forum for veterans and their families in creating a bridge of emotional reconciliation between children and their parents who have served our country from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam to today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” explained the organization’s founder, Leila Levinson, author of Gated Grief, a memoir and oral history about her father’s experience as a Jewish-American doctor liberating a Nazi Concentration Camp in 1945.

Inspired by her own experience of trans-generational trauma, Levinson spent several years interviewing dozens of World War II veterans and their grown children across the country. Addressing the “collateral damage” experienced by these veterans’ children was the inspiration for Gated Grief and the creation of the new organization.

“As I spoke with these veterans – most now in their 80s – and their families, I understood that the inability to process this grief or to even speak about these experiences has affected the lives of thousands of Americans over several generations. Addressing this trauma is the goal of my book and of Veterans’ Children.”

The site’s navigation is designed to allow visitors to engage in conversations with other veterans and other children and grandchildren of veterans, to get information about PTSD, and to tell their stories – through words, photographs and video.