Bedouin wives on the home front: Living with men serving in the Israel Defense Forces

Abstract

This community-based study examined emotional and somatic symptoms of 129 Bedouin women whose husbands serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Wives of men diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reported more symptoms than wives of men diagnosed with other disorders and wives of men with no diagnosis. Findings indicate that not only was PTSD in Bedouin servicemen positively associated with their wives' symptoms of posttraumatic stress and depression and somatic complaints, but that this relationship was fully mediated by husbands' aggression. Unraveling the special circumstances of women from traditional backgrounds faced with the devastating effects of husbands' combat-related posttraumatic pathology may inform an approach to the concept of vicarious trauma that is more specific to non-Western societies.

Cultural Perspectives on the Aftereffects of Combat Trauma: Review of a Community Study of Bedouin IDF Servicemen and Their Families

“…In a paired subset of our sample, 14 composed of 129 couples, wives averaged 31.27 (SD 8.06) years of age with 10.66 (SD 3.15) years of education and an average of 3.46 (SD 2.47) births. Poor financial status was reported by 46.5%, and 44.2% reported frequent visits to the primary care clinic in spite of only 7.8% reporting poor health status.…”

“…An important finding was that husbands’ aggression (reported by 52.7% of the wives) fully mediated the relationship between husbands’ posttraumatic symptomatology and wives’ emotional and somatic problems. 14 …”

“… 37 Internal consistency was very good in the Bedouin men’s subsample (25 items, α=0.95; 10 anxiety items, α=0.91; 15 depression items, α=0.92), and good in the wives’ subsample (25 items, α=0.89; 10 anxiety items α=0.83; 15 depression items, α=0.80). 14 …”

Veterans are not the only ones suffering from posttraumatic stress symptoms: what do we know about dependents’ secondary traumatic stress?

“…These results indicate that rather than being (solely) affected by their military partner’s traumatic experience the majority of partners develops PTSD due to exposure to a PTE independently of their partner. Most of the reviewed studies did not report if partners experienced a PTE themselves, however, Gallagher and colleagues [23] reported that all partners who met criteria for potential PTSD reported a PTE, and Caspi and colleagues [24] also reported that at least 67.4 % of the participating wives had experienced a PTE. Results from the US national comorbidity survey also showed that the lifetime prevalence of trauma exposure in women was 51.2 % [25].…”

Family interventions in traumatized immigrants and refugees: A systematic review

“…Studies examining the impact of survivors' posttraumatic symptoms on intimate partners reported elevated levels of psychiatric symptoms, somatic ailments, low self-esteem, and feelings of loneliness (Caspi et al, 2010;Figley & Figley, 2009;Lambert, Engh, Hasbun, & Holzer, 2012). Likewise, research on the intergenerational transmission of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suggests that the parents' trauma-related distress, especially PTSD, is highly associated with the level of the child's distress (Beardslee, Gladstone, Wright, & Cooper, 2003; Working with ethnic minority immigrant and refugee families…”