Military Families and Multiple Deployments the Focus of O'Brien's Carter Center Fellowship

WUSF's Bobbie O'Brien has been named a Carter Center Fellow and will spend the next year covering military members and their families who are dealing with the psychological effects of multiple overseas deployments.

O'Brien just returned from her first week of training at the Carter Center in Atlanta. She is one of six journalists in the United States to receive the prestigious Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.

"There seemed to be a great need to have a better exploration of what is going on in the military families who are right now undergoing numerous deployments, whether reservists, national guard or regular military," O'Brien said.

"It isn't just the person who is on the deployment, it's the family that's back here too," she said.

O'Brien received the fellowship based on a proposed scope of work she hopes to do over the next year, but she said she has complete control over what specific stories she will work on.

"The beauty and the design and the insistence of the Carter fellowship is that it's totally up to you what you do and the format," O'Brien said.

She said the fellowships are designed to train journalists to better understand the research being done in mental health and help reduce the stigma associated with it.

Former President Jimmy Carter told this year's Carter fellows that his wife Rosalynn hopes to work especially on that stigma.

"She felt that to bring in journalists who were top-notch experts in their own field and to let them learn more about mental illness and the adverse effect of stigma would be the best way to help reduce the infliction of stigma," Carter said recently in Atlanta.