Beyond the Article - Military Medical Stigmas & Recruiting

(Expanded Article)

Note: This article contains a discussion of suicidal ideation.

“I delayed getting [my son] treatment,” said Elizabeth Rotenberry, the spouse and caregiver of a wounded warrior. 

Rotenberry, knowing the stigma in the military community surrounding mental health issues, was worried about how seeking help might harm her son, Kristopher’s, future.

Kris was in 6th grade when his father was struck by an improvised explosive device in 2011, resulting in a traumatic brain injury and triggering PTSD, factors that led him to being honorably discharged after 14 years of service as a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant.

Kris Rotenberry is now an advocate for the Elizabeth Dole Foundation’s Hidden Helper program. He is pictured sharing his story at an event. Photo courtesy of the Rotenberry family.

Just 11 years old, Kris felt compelled to take on the role of caregiver, something he shares in common with  2.3 million military children whose parents have been wounded, or injured as a result of their military service.

Elizabeth, trying to carry on in typical military-spouse fashion taking care of four children and a husband with an unfamiliar diagnosis, could see the signs that Kris was struggling. But she thought “If I can survive deployments, and I can bring up the kids on my own, I can fix this.”

Thoughts of suicide began to plague Kris within a year of his father’s injury.

“I was anxious all the time. I was stressed out all the time,” said Kris. “I thought it’d be better if I wasn’t here.” Luckily his mother entered his too-quiet room to check on him during his suicide attempt.

In the seven years since Kris’ suicide attempt, the Rotenberry family has done everything they can to get help. He received mental health care and the family was open about their experiences, sharing with military and civilian media outlets in order to raise awareness of the impacts of service on military families including working with the Elizabeth Dole Foundation’s “Hidden Heroes” program. Despite what Kris, now 19, has experienced, he wants to continue to serve his country. But it may be that his military career is already over.

“There's no one else on the planet who wants to be a Marine more than I do,” said Kris. When Kris entered a recruiting office in November of 2022 he was told he would be at boot camp by February. That has not happened. 

Instead, he was later told by the Navy’s medical review board that he was not medically eligible to serve due to a “history of obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, suicidality” and for corrective chest surgery performed when he was a child. A civilian doctor serving the family reviewed Kris’ medical history and wrote in a letter to the Marine Corps that the conditions mentioned would not prevent Kris from serving as they “did not appear to reach the level of clinical significance and impairment in functioning associated with a diagnosis.” He was denied the ability to apply for a waiver.

“The fact that they're hung up on anxiety, that I had when I was like 11 and 12, is incredibly frustrating,” said Kris. While he understands the military’s desire to review his records to ensure he is fit for duty, he believes that their decision doesn’t seem to recognize that his was an acute mental health crisis and not an underlying issue.

The DoD has recognized the impact of military family caregiving, encourages military families to seek care for their mental health and offers programming to support those with medical and educational needs. However, the DoD doesn’t seem to know what to do with those help-seeking military kids once they try to enlist. Decades of help-discouraging behavior and outdated medical policies have fueled a pervasive stigma that impacts military medical decision-making and says: if you have a medical condition, hide it…

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When his anxiety diagnosis disqualified Christian Campbell-Carrigg from military service, he pursued public service, working on Capitol Hill for Representative Trent Kelly. Photo courtesy of Carrigg.

I was awarded a grant by Military Veterans in Journalism to understand how disability impacts recruiting. I started by talking to recruiters to understand how they review medical records. I dug into medical standards and found that the medical standards used for recruiting were more strict than the medical standards for those who are on active duty. My findings made their way into an investigative article for The War Horse.

Because the military is not held to the same employment discrimination laws as the rest of the nation it felt a bit like legal discrimination on the basis of disability. It turns out this first impression is not that far off.

“Having medical standards—don’t twist my words—but just by their very nature are discriminatory,” St. Clair says. “The services, along with [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], are making these determinations as to what is acceptable on the front end. And that’s always been informed by deployability and by attrition.”

Subscribe to learn why this issue is so concerning for parents like the Rotenberrys and Carriggs (pictured below) and an issue that will impact the future of recruiting.