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Army of Volunteers Needed to Fill Gap in Mental-Health Services
for Returning Veterans
May 28, 2009 (San Francisco, California) — An army of volunteers is urgently needed to help provide free mental-health services to the vast number of troops returning from the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here at the American Psychiatric Association 162nd Annual Meeting, representatives from Give an Hour, a national, nonprofit fledgling program, were on site recruiting volunteers to help meet an enormous need for mental-health services for returning veterans and their families.
Faced with a record number of suicides as well as the 2 signature wounds of the war — mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — the army has a need for mental-health services that is far outstripping its ability to supply them.
“As the war has gone on, it is clear we are facing a public-health crisis. There are 1.9 million men and women who have served, and if you multiply that times 10 to 15 family members for each service member, it is a huge number of people. The resources aren’t there, especially at the community level, and so we needed to harness the treatment knowledge, the good will, and the compassion of the mental-health community to step up and fill the gap,” Give an Hour founder Barbara Van Dahlen Romberg, PhD, told Medscape Psychiatry.
“Hidden Wounds” Take a Heavy Toll
She added that the toll these war-related psychological symptoms impose on veterans and their families is heavy.
“People are coming home with full-blown symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, including flashbacks, emotional numbing, anxiety, and depression.”
In addition to emotional and psychological symptoms, she added that veterans returning with mTBI frequently experience cognitive difficulties, including memory difficulties and an inability to concentrate.
Dr. Van Dahlen Romberg said that these “hidden wounds” of war frequently have a significant spillover effect that can steal into all aspects of a veteran’s life, including their family relationships, their friendships, and their ability to work.
Adding to the problem is the reluctance of many service members to seek mental-health services. There is a huge stigma in seeking mental healthcare for all individuals that is magnified in the military, she said.
“The military builds in this sense of self-efficacy, and seeking help flies in the face of that. A huge part of our work is to normalize these issues that people come home with, so they understand that it is what is expected when someone goes to war,” she said.
A Way to Give Back
Give an Hour began about 4 years ago, said Dr. Van Dahlen Romberg. “We took the first 2 years to build the organization and started providing services to individuals and their families almost 2 years ago,” she said.
To date, the organization has a network of 4000 volunteers and has provided more than 13,000 hours in mental-health services from volunteers that include psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and pastoral counselors. However, the goal is 40,000.
“There are 400,000 mental-health professionals in our country, and we think it is a reasonable goal to get 10% of that number, but at the pace we’re going we are going to exceed it. People want to give, and we’ve given them a way to do it,” she said.
Volunteers can sign up for Give an Hour at www.giveanhour.org. In order to join, individuals need to be licensed mental-health professionals and have malpractice insurance.