I want to take a moment to discuss one of the biggest joys of being a military psychologist, the clients. To do this, I will answer a question I’m periodically asked:
What do you like about working with military members?
A complete answer would take much more time and space than I have here, but I can summarize it in five major categories.
Mobile applications to support resilience-building have been an option for providers for more than a decade. But it can be difficult to know which apps best fit your client population and their goals. This blog summarizes and links three recent review articles that provide information about the functionality and effectiveness of resiliency-building apps for military-connected populations.
When conducting our two-day workshops on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), participants often note that a high percentage of their patients experience or report having sleep difficulties. Participants also note that patients seeking help have often been struggling with these problems for years. As a result, patients can enter into treatment feeling both helpless and hopeless about the possibility of their sleep functioning improving.
Alcohol use disorder within families is a topic with potential impact across subpopulations and is not specific to the population of military families. In fact, although reviews of research suggest that there may be a higher incidence of problematic drinking in some segments (but not all) of the military, the highest rates of problematic drinking seem to be observed in military populations that are inconsistent with military families with children (as factors related to higher rates include those who are single and do not have children; Osborne et al., 2022). Even more explicitly, I’m not aware of any studies which have noted a heightened prevalence of problematic drinking in military families with children versus civilian families with children.
Child and adolescent behavioral health clinicians have always been invested in the mental health needs of our youngest clients. They have a profound understanding of how biology, family, community, and systems impact youth mental health. Mental health needs for children and adolescents continue to rise to an unsurpassed level. Nearly one in five children have a diagnosable mental health condition like depression, anxiety, or ADHD and according to the Centers for Disease Control.