A new effort has launched at Oregon State University in Corvallis to specifically address the mental health needs of veterans, active duty service members and students who are dependents of service members. Don Phillips was hired in August as OSU’s new coordinator of veteran and military-connected student mental health and wellness. He served four years as an active duty Army medic, including a deployment to Iraq, and graduated from OSU in 2016 before becoming a licensed counselor. He joins us to talk about working with this specific group of students, and how his own lived experience can help reduce the stigma around talking about mental health among veterans on campus.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. There’s a new effort at Oregon State University to provide better mental health support to veterans and other military connected students. It’ll focus on the specific mental health needs of this specific population. Don Phillips knows these needs well. He served four years as an active duty army medic, including a deployment to Iraq. He graduated from OSU in 2016 before becoming a licensed counselor. He was hired in August to coordinate these new services at OSU and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Don Phillips: Hi, thanks for having me.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. Where did the idea for this new position come from?
Phillips: Well, Oregon State University has made a recent push to try to serve populations that have different mental health needs and to identify those populations. They’ve looked at student outreach, faculty conversations as well as statistics. And so the veteran and military-connected student coordinator is just one of the latest in the coordinator positions that OSU has brought on.
Miller: What does it mean to say that somebody is military connected?
Phillips: For OSU’s definition of that, that can be like ROTC students who are currently using the reserve officer training corps program to work towards commission as officers in whatever branch of the United States military that they are currently doing their ROTC program through. But it also touches on dependents of veterans and service members and like their children.
Miller: And then there’s also students who are veterans?
Phillips: Correct. That, so it does divide my position into veteran and military connected. So it’s veterans and also active duty and sometimes there’s overlap. Some individuals will be on active duty or in the National Guard and actively serving in the Guard and be pursuing the ROTC program, because they want to work towards being an officer instead of lower enlisted.
Miller: How big is this population when you add everybody together?
Phillips: So we have over 2,000 veterans and/or active duty service members attending OSU, either on campus here in Corvallis, through the Cascades or our e-campus program. We’ve also got three ROTC programs. We have the Army ROTC, Air Force ROTC and then the Navy ROTC, which includes both the Navy and Marine Corps programs. I don’t have numbers on the ROTC, but yeah, we’re looking at over 2,000 students at OSU.
Miller: How does the prevalence of mental health problems among veterans compare to the general population?
Phillips: That’s a hard one. In 2019, the Reed Group did a study at the behest of the Oregon Department of Veterans Affairs and the Oregon Health Authority, and some of the findings were a little counterintuitive. They found that oftentimes veterans will report at a higher rate that they’ve never been told they have a depressive disorder, while at the same time, depending on what age range we’re talking about, up to 2.5 times as likely to die by suicide as their civilian counterparts.
Miller: How do you make sense of that?
Phillips: So I would make sense of that by looking at this culture in the military to embrace the suck or just to drive on through adversity, which can often leave individuals not reporting when they’re not feeling the best. When we look at depression diagnosis, we are looking for specific diagnostic criteria and those tend to be based off of individual reports. So if a person is like, yeah, well, I feel like garbage most of the time, nearly every day, but that’s just normal, they might not report that that’s something they’re struggling with.
Miller: I imagine that this then has to be one of the challenges of your job. How do you get people who might most need the kind of help that it’s now your job to provide, to seek you out?
Phillips: I go into their spaces. I do a lot of outreach, which is part of my position. I spend time in the Holcomb Center for Military and Veteran Resources here on OSU’s campus, which is a place that has computers and study areas for veteran and military connected students to just kind of utilize and hang out in. And I go about in the spaces, I interact with students, I let my face be known and kind of introduce myself as a fellow veteran. One of the things that often also, according to the Reed Group study, is the case for veterans is that they have concerns about mental health professionals not really understanding the context of their service. And so that feeling misunderstood can also be a barrier for these individuals to try to access treatment.
Miller: How would you describe your reentry to civilian life after your four years of active duty, which included a deployment to Iraq in 2009 and 2010?
Phillips: Yeah, I’d probably describe it as messy. To a certain extent, I think I took up a pretty typical trajectory upon exit from the military, where I was figuring out what’s next, and like many individuals who earn the GI bill during their time in service, college just felt like the direction to go. And it took me a little while to navigate and address the issues I was facing as I exited the military and tried to reintegrate into the civilian population, while being surrounded by traditionally aged college students who didn’t all necessarily have the same ideas on accountability and communication that I did.
Miller: What are examples of what you’re talking about there?
Phillips: A common saying in the military is “right place, right time, right uniform,” and things like “if you’re not 15 minutes early, you’re late.” And so a lot of the time you will have these nontraditional students who have served time in the military approaching their schooling from a place of a mission focus. They’re there to get their degree, where sometimes you might find that individuals who are attending college directly out of high school, your traditional age college students, are there for the college experience as well.
Miller: Is there a part of you that thinks college would be more effective for people if more people had had the military approach you’re describing?
Phillips: To an extent, yeah. I gotta give it props, I think that the college experience is great for some people and it really gives them the opportunity to figure out who they are, because a lot of the time, being a nontraditional student means that you’ve spent your teens to early twenties exploring your identity in a different context. And where a lot of these individuals who are traditionally aged students, this can be their first time not under their parents’ roof or being on their own and responsible for themselves.
Miller: What are some of the other cultural differences between military life and civilian life that were a real challenge for you and that you think your awareness of those are crucial for your current job?
Phillips: I think that one of the big things that both is something I experienced to an extent but I see a lot more in the population, is isolation. In the military, if you ask many service members, what’s the thing they miss the most about their time in service, it’s the camaraderie. Now, that’s not everybody, individuals are all different. But what you find is these individuals will miss camaraderie and then they will come out of the military and find themselves in situations where they don’t feel comfortable interacting, the norms are different. We’re talking about like the kinds of language we use, because veterans - not always but often - can be crass, as well as [using] terse communication, which is common in the military. And so individuals can receive negative feedback and it can lead towards isolation, which can exacerbate any existing mental health concerns. [It’s] common because I believe the same Reed Group study [showed] something like 85% of prior service members have experienced potentially traumatic events in their lifetime, with an average of 5.4 events.
Miller: The sense I got is when you were talking about your transitioning from the military, that going to college, it seemed like just the next logical step, but it didn’t seem like you necessarily knew what would follow from there. You were just sort of following this path. What drew you to becoming, eventually, a licensed professional counselor?
Phillips: My history as a medic. When I got to college, the most rewarding thing I’d ever done in my life was help others in my capacity as a medic. And I also developed a distaste for emergency medicine during that time. And as somebody who has a deep interest in people and the way we operate, psychology and later becoming a counselor, just ended up feeling like the right path to take and kind of a value matching choice.
Miller: What kinds of veteran specific services do you wish had been available for you 10 years ago when you were at the same university where you’re now an employee?
Phillips: A few of them are already in existence now. When I was at OSU, we didn’t have a military and veteran resource center. When they hired our first director of military and veteran resources, I was one of his first work studies and we worked out of a room that was a little bit bigger than a closet. And then there was a tiny little hallway that was attached to another small room with a couple of computers in it. So, the large space that is the Holcomb Center is one of those aspects that I would have loved to have seen, as well as this position.
As far as what I would like to continue to see would be kind of just more integration of intersecting identities on campus. Being a veteran is just one aspect of who anybody is. It’s not completely defining for most people. And so that ability to feel comfortable in all of the spaces on campus is something that I would still like to see.
Miller: What do you think that would look like?
Phillips: I think it would look like an organized effort between the various cultural centers and community partners on campus to celebrate intersecting identity. And what makes people, people. During Black History Month, celebrating the history of service of Black and African Americans in the United States military. When we look at Indigenous people, celebrating the history of disproportionately high service among Native populations, especially tribes like the Lakota or how during World War I, there was this large push of service among Native Americans, when they weren’t even given citizenship. And so specifically for my population, like celebrating these intersecting identities and drawing community for these individuals who might not match the stereotype of a veteran.
Miller: Don Phillips, thanks very much for joining us. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Phillips: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Miller: Don Phillips is the new coordinator of veteran and military-connected student mental health and wellness at Oregon State University.
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