Robert Kyle has tattoos of friends' initials who
were killed while deployed. He now works as a peer coach at Vets Prevail.
(CNN) -- Things probably should have turned out differently
for Samantha Schilling.
The stories she tells have dark
beginnings and could have had, under different circumstances, dark endings -- as
so many stories for those in the military do.
Schilling, now 31, served in the
U.S. Navy from 1999 to 2003. She was never deployed but worked as an information
systems technician at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.
Several of her colleagues were
killed during the 2000 al Qaeda
bombing
of the USS Cole in Yemen, which left 17 dead and at least 37 injured. Some
of the injured were transferred to her base in Norfolk.
Many of the survivors suffered
from mental trauma after the bombing. One of them, a man who had been aboard the
ship, attacked Schilling and attempted to rape her.
That assault drove home the
impact that active duty had on her colleagues' mental
state.
"I experienced military sexual
trauma, and that just inspired me," she said. "Coming back into civilian life,
you're not the same person you were in the military. ... You carry with you all
these burdens, all these stressors."
Schilling was released from
service with an honorable medical discharge in 2003. Since that time, she has
taken on a personal mission to help others who need counseling after military
service. She's nearly completed a masters in a joint military psychology and
neuropsychology program at
the
Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago and plans to finish her
doctorate degree in 2015.
Samantha Schilling, with her father, lost several colleagues in the USS
Cole bombing.
"I'm determined to be able to be
helpful to others," she said. "Helping others helps me. ... I think therapy can
help people adapt to civilian life again instead of maladapt. People who have
PTSD and other (issues) can maladapt and cause trouble in the civilian
world."
It's no secret the U.S. military
has struggled to adequately support its troops after they leave active duty.
A large number of service
members suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). An estimated 11% to
20% of veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffer from the
condition, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
That's between 220,000 and
400,000 of the 2 million troops deployed since the September 11 terrorist
attacks.
A
new study (PDF) shows that only about half of U.S. service
members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan diagnosed with PTSD received any
treatment for it.
And
statistics from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs show
that about 18 veterans commit suicide every day.
But some former active-duty
service members aren't waiting for help to arrive.The VA has stepped up efforts to
expand care and
recently announced plans to hire 1,600 more mental health
professionals and 300 support staff members to help meet the increasing demand
for services.
Veterans have turned to
psychology to become mental health professionals, and they're filling in gaps in
veteran care that government and civilian efforts have left open. And while they
are still rare, programs to train them are slowly emerging at universities and
nonprofit organizations around the United States.
"It's just going to
increase and increase"
Born a year ago with funding
from the Department of Veteran Services in Massachusetts, a program through the
Massachusetts School of
Professional Psychology called
Train Vets to Treat Vets has recently picked up steam. It has
several goals: mentoring new veterans, providing services to at-risk and
homeless veterans, and educating the public about ways they can help.
"As the stigma (of seeking
professional mental health treatment) breaks down more and more, and more
veterans are willing to come into treatment, (the need) is just going to
increase and increase," said Robert Chester, 25, who served in the National
Guard for six years and became a student at the Massachusetts School of
Professional Psychology.
"That's why we want to get more
veterans into mental health, both to break down the stigma and get more
clinicians out there."
Chester is now an admissions
assistant at Train Vets to Treat Vets.
Starting the program was a joint
effort between the Massachusetts Department of Veterans'
Services and veterans (Chester and colleagues Greg Matos and Norman Tippens) who
are also students at at the school.
"We, as the veteran students,
wanted to see that we could create more of a military cohort at our school,"
Chester said. "We really wanted to put something together where we can help our
fellow veterans by providing mental health services in that specific way."
Since the program's start,
Chester has fielded e-mails every day from veterans who want to get involved.
Six will enroll in the school's fall class.
Massachusetts School of
Professional Psychology President Nick Covino says the idea for the program came
from a Latino mental health program the school began about eight years ago.
"It was clear that folks who
wanted to talk about emotional issues ... want to talk about emotional issues
with somebody that understands their culture and probably want to do it with
somebody that's from their culture," Covino said. "It was a natural extension to
think about returning veterans."
Having student veterans in the
program has been beneficial not only to the veterans it has helped but to
non-veteran graduate students who want to specialize in veteran care.
From casual conversations to
exchanging papers and working on doctoral projects together, a collaboration
between veteran and non-veteran students is "radically changing the academic
culture of our learning community," Covino said.
Laptop
battlefield
Leaning over an occasionally
beeping laptop in a downtown Chicago office building, Robert Kyle rolls up the
sleeves of a blue button-down shirt to reveal heavily tattooed forearms.
On one, a drawing that looks
like the Grim Reaper. On the other, columns of initials. There are so many, his
arm is more ink than skin.
He explains that they're the
initials of friends who died alongside him while deployed in Afghanistan and
Iraq. There are 53, he says. But there are more to add he hasn't gotten around
to yet.
Kyle, who goes by his first and
middle name online for security reasons, has his own set of challenges. At 26,
he has survived three deployments and sustained a traumatic brain injury. He
enlisted in the Army when he was 17 and served from 2003 to 2009.
Although he still carries
burdens from his deployment, since his return, he hasn't forgotten about his
military family. Some, he knows personally; others, he's only met through that
beeping laptop. He has dedicated his life to helping veterans connect to one
another and improve their mental health.
Kyle works as a peer coach at
Vets Prevail, a free online
forum and multistep mental health program. It was founded in 2009 by a small
group of professionals, almost all of them veterans.
While working as a peer coach,
Kyle is pursuing a graduate degree in psychology from DePaul University.
Six salaried professionals work
at Vets Prevail, as well as three peer coaches who directly interact with
veterans online. Although the peer coaches are not doctors, they complete a
training process, and most important, Kyle says, they have all served on active
duty.
"When they hear that you have
done what they've done, (veterans) tend to open up more than someone that has
never been in a combat zone. That opens a little more trust," Kyle says.
"Veterans are doing this for veterans."
Kyle retired from service in
2009 after his injury and went back to school, earning a degree in psychology
from Lees-McRae College in North Carolina.
Since that time, he has worked
to develop Vets Prevail. Now, more than 8,000 veterans from about 5,000 ZIP
codes turn to the site to chat and learn coping mechanisms, and membership is
rapidly increasing.
Justin Savage, a 32-year-old
Army veteran who works as the head of program development for Vets Prevail, says
a large part of that success is the users' assurance that the experts on the
other side of the computer screen are speaking their language.
"We live and breathe
accountability," said Savage, who returned from Iraq in 2005. "Having vets do it
really brings a new level."
"A really good
fit"
It makes sense that veterans
would want to become mental health professionals, psychologist
Joe Troiani says. In a military culture built on camaraderie,
the desire to help a fellow veteran is natural and powerful.
Troiani, an associate professor
at the
Adler School of
Professional Psychology, where Schilling is a student, is also a retired
Navy commander and is determined to ensure that veterans get the help they
need.
"If I was in trouble, I could
pick up the phone and call some of my veteran friends," Troiani said. "You and I
could have served together, and I have your back, you have my back. If something
happens to you, I'm going to make sure that your family is taken care of."
The Adler School offers training
for a new post-doctorate specialty called "
military clinical psychology" and since the program's start
two years ago has trained about 20 students per class. The need is greater, but
20 is the cutoff to ensure the best training, Troiani says.
Entering the mental health field
can be "a really good fit personality-wise" for veterans, says
Bret Moore, a former
active-duty Army psychologist who completed two tours in Iraq.
"(Service members) want to
protect and help people get through difficult times," Moore said. "That's really
what a psychologist does: helps people who are more vulnerable, or not as strong
in a certain sense, get through difficult times."
Taking responsibility for
another human life is a familiar duty for veterans, Covino says.
"To have been in situations
where they've needed to rely on judgment and develop a capacity for reflection,
an ability to act autonomously and courageously. ... Those are qualities of
character you can't teach," Covino said.
"They haven't
experienced it"
Jon Neely, a 45-year-old living
in Springfield, Illinois, has been using Vets Prevail for several months and
says he logs on for about an hour every week, though when he first began using
it, he logged on every day. Neely served in Kosovo from 1999 to 2000 and retired
from the military in 2005.
"All too often, you go seek help
from somebody that is book-learned, but they don't understand," he said. "They
don't know. To me, getting help or seeking help from a non-veteran is like going
to a marriage counselor that has never been married. They know all the book
knowledge, but they haven't experienced it."
Sarah Bonner, 31, an Air Force
veteran who was medically discharged from Ramstein Air Base in Germany in 2006,
is an active user of Vets Prevail. She says that talking to a "like-minded"
person is what has kept her coming back to the site.
She has bonded with the peer
coaches, to whom she refers by their first names like friends, in a way she did
not expect.
"There were a couple times
recently, I was at a really low point," she said. "I was angry, and I wasn't
holding back with what I said. They don't care. If I want to cuss out and
threaten to punch something, they might say, 'Let's think of softer things than
the wall to punch.' ... They let you talk about the stuff that's ugly."
"Why did all of us
serve?"
Training veterans to treat other
veterans does involve some risk, Chester says. If veterans are not stable
themselves, they should not treat others as mental health professionals. For
that reason, it can be a good idea for them to work with a psychologist even
while they administer care to others.
There is so much training and
hands-on experience involved in a post-doctorate program that
it is highly unlikely a veteran who is still feeling unstable would make it all
the way through, Troiani says. Rarely, but occasionally, a veteran will say,
"This program is not a good fit for me," he says.
But if it is a good fit, the
results can be rewarding.
"Why did all of us serve if not
for each other?" Kyle asked. "Just because we're not in the military any more,
it doesn't mean we are no longer brother and sister. It's a bond we'll have for
the rest of our lives."
