Military needs better ways to promote mental health services

By Richard E. Gill
Assistant Editor
    “When I returned home from Vietnam all I wanted was to get out of there and get home,” said retired Army Col. Will Wilson, Ph.D. “That’s pretty much the case with everybody serving now. They just want to get home. They don’t want to be bothered with all the assessments.”
   And therein lies the problem, Wilson said. With that mentality how do you properly tell returning veterans about all the resources available to them that can help with mental health issues such as stress or PTSD?
   “People trying to work the system may be good, but the process is very, very difficult. How do you inform returning veterans about the whole process, the whole system put in place to help them? How do you get people in touch with resources that are in place to serve their needs?” Wilson asked.
   “How you get the word to people of what’s possible and available is a challenging situation. I’ll be damned if I know the answer,” he added.
   “You’ve got to get to them when they’re interested. You’ve got to get to them when they’re listening and you have to have the resources available,” said Wilson, a clinical psychologist and chair of Industrial Organizational Psychology at Capella University.
   Otherwise, many veterans who could face drinking problems or anger as well as other serious mental health conditions will not take advantage of the many resources available to them. Problems, he said, can only become more serious and result in greater troubles in the future if not treated as soon as possible. And holding orientation sessions in the early morning hours as some have complained is a waste of time, he said.
   One psychologist who asked not to be named said the service often held orientation sessions at 2, 3 or 4 a.m.– a time when military personnel are half asleep and could care less about the information provided. They just want to get home and the information falls on deaf ears.
   Wilson explained that most returning veterans are coming from a high intensity environment and “they’re decompressing.” Some of that energy can manifest itself not only in initial joy and enthusiasm but a certain amount of post-combat reaction. Some psychologists refer to it as depression, he said.
   All that means, Wilson explained, is their energy level is really down. They’ve been focused on danger and violence and all of a sudden they’re thrust back into a totally different environment and it’s disorienting. Trying to disseminate information at such a time is challenging.
   They can’t be force-fed, but they have to understand what is out there to help them and take advantage of it, said Wilson, who has a great interest in communicating all the different pieces the military has to offer returning veterans, as well as their families.
   Wilson feels it’s important to orient families about what can happen to them when a family member is deployed to a dangerous area and also what might happen when that person returns.
   “They (families) don’t know what other people are feeling and they feel very alone. One format is to reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. Maybe you have to give veterans the information in writing or on a CD that tells them everything they need to know or in a cookbook that says if you have this issue go to this page and read up on the problem you face.”
   Wilson said the process is not broken but it is stressed. This is not only a local problem, but also a national one. However, he feels the military is doing everything possible to see that veterans get immediate and proper treatment.
   He believes that mental health professionals are working hard within the system and the military seems to be responding to the needs of returning veterans. The military simply has to find better ways to get veterans’ attention.
   Too many veterans walk away without the necessary information that will help them, either because they don’t think they need treatment or the information they received was given at a time when they were thinking of home, not how to best seek help for a potential problem.
   “If I see any shortcomings in the system it would be the lack of connectedness within the process.” But, he admitted, “It’s a very challenging problem, especially when you have people spread all across the country.”  

 

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