Star Program Helps Connect Military and Therapists
May is National Military Appreciation Month, and Aspire Indiana Health is proud to serve — and employ — many veterans.
Desire’e Greer, Clinical Supervisor for Aspire’s Carmel health center, knows how challenging it can be for current and former members of the military to reach out for help. She is a therapist herself, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), and the daughter of a military veteran who spent much of her childhood moving from station to station, including several combat deployments.
Military personnel can face great stigma within their own ranks for reaching out for help, particularly for a mental health issue. Her own father had to be convinced to do so, and then his negative experience helped inform her own future disposition as a clinician.
“The very first question he was asked was, ‘How many people have you killed?’” Greer says.
“The way we approach the military as clinicians is completely different than civilians. There are certain questions to ask and certain questions to avoid. Therapists have to be really educated to make sure we’re not triggering them.”
Based partly on her father’s experiences, Greer switched her major in college from teacher to therapist. Now she works to find ways to better connect current and former military members to mental health providers — and educate therapists how to treat them.
One way is through the Star Behavioral Health Providers program, which links military members and families to therapists trained to help them. At www.starproviders.org, people seeking help can search for credentialed providers near them. It also provides training to mental health care therapists in order to be listed.
Greer herself is Star-certified and is working to encourage all current therapists at Aspire to undergo the training themselves. It is part of the nonprofit provider’s goal of eventually obtaining status as a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCHBHC).
“As part of CCBHC, serving more veterans and serving them better is one of nine key components. We weren’t asking the right questions we needed to know to get the answers. In many cases, therapists don’t even ask patients about their veteran status,” Greer says.
“In Hamilton County, we have more veterans than anywhere else in the state of Indiana. And we’re not serving as many as we should.”
Star offers three tiers of training. The first is on basic military culture, while the second and third are geared toward how to treat military patients. To date, 14 Aspire therapists have gone through at least the first or second tiers, and the goal is to get as many as possible to complete all levels.
