Recommendations And Program Improvements For FA

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Recommendations and Program Improvement Recommendations The Families over Coming under Stress program (FOCUS) provides resilience training to military children and families. The program works closely with both military and community mental health resources to provide service and family members with referral options (Lester et al,2011). From the start, FOCUS was conceived as a skill-based, family-centered, trauma-informed prevention intervention designed to promote family resiliency and to alleviate stressful deployment related issues and events on children and parent. FOCUS was developed on a family level base, rather than an individual level. All three foundational programs from which this program was developed were all directed toward children and parents who were at risk for psychological and mental disorders or serious life impairment (Lester et al,2011).

Also this program does not provide services within a mental health diagnosis and treatment model. My recommendation for the program would be to also focus on building resilience on an individual level with a special emphasis on social support on an individual basis. Higher perceived social support is associated with lower risk of PTSD (Stecker et al,2010). Increased psychological resilience and perceived social support may help protect against the effects of depression and traumatic stress by decreasing fear-related appraisals, improving emotional regulation, enhancing self-efficacy as well as stress-related arousal (Stecker et al,2010). The support that individuals receive not only from family members, but friends, colleagues, organizations and community also has a profound impact on individual dealing with PTSD.

Social Cognitive Theory Social cognitive theory places emphasis on social influence and its emphasis on external and internal social reinforcement. According to Bandura, social cognitive theory adopts an agentic model of adaptation and change rather than a reactive dispositional one (Benight and Bandura, 1997, 2004). To be an agent is to influence one’s functioning and one’s life circumstances. Individuals play a proactive role in their adaptation, rather than simply undergo experiences in which environmental stressors act on their personal vulnerabilities. Within this agentic perspective, resilience to adversity relies more on personal enablement than on environmental protectiveness (Benight and Bandura,1997,2004).

Individuals and their amount of support operates in a cultural context which includes beliefs, ideas and values people hold about people and their social relationships which they take part (Johnson and Thompson,2008) Therefore, these contexts can affect the receipt and provision of social support by having influence of an individual’s own definition of support, evaluation and appraisal of events, and propensity to give, get, accept or reject support (Beardslee et al,2011). Suggestions There are several ways that building resilience in the military can be strengthened. Responsibilities, definitive clear policies, and broad guidance to implement these strategies. For accurate program evaluations, resilient policies should be directed.

Using standardized measures to compare various programs, such evaluations may provide information for military members and their families for informed decisions about program selections. A common major challenge in regards to building a solid resiliency program within the military culture is getting support from senior operational leadership. It is extremely important that operational commanders fully understand their role in building a resilient force. It is especially important to design programs with the involvement of senior military leaders in order to motivate service members’ interest by promoting values that are important to the service cultures (RAND, nd). Without strong leadership, military resilience programs cannot be successful.

Overall, strong leadership and command will allow the success of resilience programming and will progress the current status and resilience of service members and their families. References Beardslee, W., Lester, P., Klosinski, L., Saltzman, W., Woodward, K., Nash, W., Leskin, G. (2011). Family-Centered Preventive Intervention for Military Families: Implications for Implementation Science. Prevention Science , 12 (4), 339–348. Benight, C. C., & Bandura, A. (2004). Social cognitive theory of posttraumatic recovery: the role of perceived self-efficacy. Behavior Research and Therapy, 42 (10), . doi:10.1016/j.brat.2003.08.008 Johnson, H., & Thompson, A. (2008). The development and maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in civilian adult survivors of war trauma and torture: A review. Clinical Psychology Review, 28 (1), 36-47. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2007.01.017 Lester, P., Mogil, C., Saltzman, W., Woodward, K., Nash, W., Leskin, G., Beardslee, W. (2011). Families Overcoming Under Stress: Implementing Family-Centered Prevention for Military Families Facing Wartime Deployments and Combat Operational Stress. Military Medicine, 176 (1), 19-25. doi:10.7205/milmed-d- Stecker, T., Fortney, J., Hamilton, F., Sherbourne, C. D., & Ajzen, I. (2010). Engagement in mental health treatment among veterans returning from Iraq. Patient Preference and Adherence , 4 , 45–49.