Personalized Care Is the Best Mental Health Care
3-minute read
Personalized Care Is the Best Mental Health Care
3-minute read
One of the benefits of mental health therapy is the personal connection and attention it provides.
You’re engaged in back-and-forth conversations with professionals to help them understand your particular feelings, challenges, and needs. You’re getting care that evolves based on your response to treatment and your progress. And if you’re getting mental health care through VA, you’re getting therapists who understand Veterans because they work with Veterans all the time.
Here's how four Veterans describe the impact of this human connection on their care.
Human conversations
“I’ve been fortunate enough to find doctors that fit who I am and help me,” says Joey, a U.S. Navy Veteran. Joey sought help after serving in Afghanistan because he became very irritable, didn’t like people hanging around him, and behaved in ways that scared his 3-year-old son.
“My psychologist was another naval officer. He was great. He was very down-to-earth, let me speak like a normal human,” Joey says. “And then I was assigned a psychiatrist to talk about medication, and she also lets me just vent sometimes, which is great.”
Joey continues to meet weekly with his therapist and monthly with his psychiatrist for managing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “I think it's important to have that because we often believe that once things feel okay that we’ve got it under control, but it’s nice to have those check-ins because it’s a third-party perspective,” he says.
Evolving treatment
Mental health treatment is an evolving process, as seen in Bridget’s progression through the various treatments she has received for trauma-related challenges.
The Navy Veteran started with psychodynamic therapy, which focuses on how unconscious thoughts, emotions, and past experiences affect current behavior, feelings, and relationships. “It definitely was the first therapy that pushed me in the direction of figuring out what was going on,” says Bridget, who at that point had not yet been diagnosed with PTSD.
Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) advanced her to another level with its focus on how she experiences and manages her emotions. “That’s when I really started to understand PTSD and what I was going through,” she says. DBT also gave her tools she could use in difficult moments.
Then eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) treatment helped Bridget in another way. “It’s bypassing the thinking brain. It’s getting into the body where a lot of the trauma lives,” she explains.
“This stuff is going to live with me for my life,” she says of her past trauma. “But I know now how to find the tools when I need them.”
Treatment from someone who cares
Joseph, a U.S. Army Veteran, credits a specific therapist as a key to beginning his recovery from addiction. “He was like a mentor to me. You could tell that he really cared. Talking to me like a brother, and I could relate to that,” Joseph says.
“He just told me some key things that helped me,” Joseph adds. “One, he said, ‘Never take advantage of your support system.’ Two, ‘Just remember who you are.’ I just took it and ran with it.” Therapies such as DBT, which teaches skills for controlling harmful and impulsive behaviors, gave him ways to maintain his recovery after completing an intensive program for substance use disorder.
“You can go to 90 meetings in 90 days, it’s not going to keep you clean,” he says. “But the therapy was the key because it helped me face the demons that I had been running from for so many years.”
Life-saving connections
Ricky, a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran, tried to numb his emotions with drugs and alcohol after being sexually assaulted during his service. “I knew in order for me to survive and actually have a productive life that I needed to seek some help and I needed somebody to guide me in a different direction,” Ricky says. When he started applying what he learned in treatment, he was able to turn his life around.
“It was a long transition, but the therapeutic part of it for me was just to be able to sit in front of somebody and be open about what I had gone through. Just to know that other men have gone through that,” he says. “Connection saves lives.”
