On the Job: Veterans Show Mental Health Care’s Value for Work
3-minute read
On the Job: Veterans Show Mental Health Care’s Value for Work
3-minute read
Transitioning from military service to a civilian job or career can present work challenges. For some Veterans, mental health conditions related to their service create additional obstacles. They may experience symptoms that make it more difficult to focus, get motivated, control feelings like anger or anxiety, or get the sleep they need to be productive.
For Veterans experiencing these challenges, mental health care can make a big difference in their ability to adjust, flourish, and find a career that satisfies their needs—as Veterans like Duane, Deidre, and Manuel discovered. “The therapy—I couldn’t have done it without it,” Deidre says of her ability to understand who she wanted to be.
Here’s how mental health care helped 3 Veterans find fulfillment in their work.
Duane: Designing a new career
Duane, a U.S. Army Veteran, credits his mental health treatment with opening his mind up to new possibilities for himself.
That wasn’t his mindset when he started therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and tried to overcome his resistance to accepting help. “It takes strength to know that you can't do it on your own,” Duane says. “I remember telling my psychologist, ‘I don't work well with others.’”
At the time, Duane didn’t know how to cope in healthy ways with PTSD from his deployments to Iraq and the loss there of 12 of the 15 soldiers from his basic training battery. “That darkness will consume you,” Duane says.
Therapy—including group sessions with other Veterans who understood his experiences and their impacts—helped pull him out of his harmful behaviors. “Now, I'm able to understand that trauma myself and how it affected me,” he says. He also gained the confidence he needed to explore new possibilities for himself.
“That really opened my eyes to this notion that I didn’t have to be what I thought I was,” he says. Duane went back to college, discovered a passion for creating fashion, and opened a successful fashion design business.
“The ability to change and the ability to get better is within each of us,” he says. “The VA, for me, provided that framework.”
Deidre: Opening up her potential
Deidre, who served in the U.S. Army as a finance specialist from 1981 to 1984, remembers her first sergeant telling her that she had a lot of potential. But it took her many years, and help from therapy, to figure out what the sergeant meant and how to achieve her potential.
While still in the service, she began experiencing symptoms of depression, although she didn’t associate her feelings with a mental health condition. As a Veteran, she started working civilian jobs, but her mental health was further affected by her husband’s physical abuse and her mother’s history of neglect. Deidre lost her job and became homeless.
“I had this worthlessness feeling about myself,” Deidre says.
Reaching out to an agency that supports Veterans and to VA for mental health treatment helped turn her life around. “You go through ups and downs and if you ignore it, it's going to manifest itself, and not in a healthy way,” she says. “I had to just acknowledge who I was, who I wanted to be, and fortunately who I had always been, but just hadn’t let it come out.”
Looking for work again, she sought a job that would let her give back to the community. She found one at a nonprofit that finds housing for Veterans who are experiencing homelessness—living out her potential by helping others and turning her past experiences into a force for good.
Manuel: Removing barriers to success
When Manuel left the U.S. Navy in 2011, he decided to join a program for Navy Veterans that put them on the path to becoming a registered nurse. What he didn’t realize, however, was that he was experiencing symptoms of PTSD.
He became addicted to a prescribed medication and methamphetamines, and committed crimes to pay for his addiction. Caught and sentenced to prison, he began to climb back with cognitive behavioral therapy and a 6-month treatment program for substance use disorder.
“I understood through cognitive behavioral therapy, I was using drugs to really try to cover up some of my traumas,” Manuel says. Once released from prison, he continued with CBT and other therapies for PTSD, earned a bachelor’s degree, started pursuing a doctorate, and landed a job with a 6-figure salary.
“I was scared to ask for help,” Manuel says. “It took me to prison because I was so scared to ask for help. But once I did, there’s no ceiling to the successes I’ve had.”
