Seeking the Military Suicide Solution

About Today’s Guest:

Barbara Van Dahlen, Ph.D., named to TIME magazine’s 2012 list of the 100 most influential people in the world, is the president of Give an Hour. A licensed clinical psychologist who has been practicing in the Washington, D.C., area for over 20 years, she received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Maryland in 1991. Concerned about the mental health implications of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dr. Van Dahlen founded Give an Hour in 2005 to enlist mental health professionals to provide free services to U.S. troops, veterans, their loved ones, and their communities.

Working with other nonprofit leaders, Dr. Van Dahlen developed the Community Blueprint, a national initiative and online tool to assist communities in more effectively and strategically supporting veterans and military families. Give an Hour has implemented the Blueprint approach in two demonstration sites and continues to lead community collaboration projects.

In June of 2019, she was named the Executive Director of the Task Force to create the President’s Roadmap to Empower Veterans and End a National Tragedy of Suicide (PREVENTS).

Episode Transcript:

Duane France:  (00:00) Welcome to episode one of the seeking the military suicide solution podcast brought to you by the military times. I'm Duane France

Shauna Springer: (00:07) And I'm Doc Shauna Springer

Duane France:  (00:08) And we'd like to thank you for taking the time to learn more about suicide in the military affiliated population.

Duane France:  (00:22) Thanks again to everybody for joining us to listen to an honest conversation about service member veteran and military family suicide. Our guest today is Barbara Van Dahlen. Shauna, how about you tell us about the guest.

Shauna Springer: (00:34) Sure. Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen is a clinical psychologist who serves as the executive director of the task force to create the President's Roadmap to Empower Veterans and End a National Tragedy of Suicide. What's called PREVENTS. Prior to spearheading the efforts of PREVENTS, Dr. Van Dahlen and founded Give An Hour in 2005 based on her concern that as a nation, we would not be ready to respond to the needs of those who have deployed to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As president of Give An Hour, Barbara led efforts to create a national network of mental health professionals who provide free services to us troops, veterans, their loved ones and their communities. Like many people who become leaders in the field, Barbara's work is not just a job. It's personal. After serving in the Pacific during world war II, her father came home with post traumatic stress. At the time, there was no concept of what PTSD is and how it can be treated like there is today. Barbara and her father were very close and she admired him for his strength, especially as he stepped into the role of being a single father for much of her childhood. So Give An Hour was established in large part because of Barbara's lived experience and the resultant clarity in her perception that we need to do a better job at supporting those who serve in our military. In today's episode, she and Duane discuss the concrete aims of the task force and her philosophical approach to the work of suicide prevention.

Duane France: (02:01) That's great. I really appreciate that. Whenever we were thinking about who the first guest should be, or lining up the guests, obviously the prevents task force where it is right now and where it's going to be going, she was definitely one of the first ones that I thought of, and that you agreed, would really be important to come on the show. So let's get into the conversation then. You and I will come back afterwards to pull out some of the key points.

Duane France: (02:33) So the PREVENTS Task Force, I've been hearing about it for a couple of years, obviously it's been in the works. President Trump signed the executive order back in March and now it's a thing. So if you can give us maybe a little bit of an overview of what the PREVENTS Task Force is.

Dr. Van Dahlen: (02:50) Sure. So maybe this will help frame why this is such an extraordinary issue, at least from my perspective and why I was so honored to take the position. So I was aware as many people in our community, those of us who are working to support military veterans, you know, related to this work, suicide prevention, mental health in general. I read the, the executive order in March when it was signed. I was actually then at that point the president of Give an Hour, the organization I ran for 15 years that I founded, I was asked to read it by a news outlet that wanted me to comment on it. And so I read it and I thought, this is extraordinary. We have never seen an effort from the federal government focused on addressing a challenge, a societal challenge like suicide. So that was my reaction.

Dr. Van Dahlen: (03:48) I was like, Oh my gosh. And the opportunity to pull together across agencies was just as I said, extraordinary. And so little did I know a couple months later I was called and asked whether I would consider running the task force becoming the executive director. And I was, you know, I said I was honored. And so, so began my journey with this work. The executive order, PREVENTS is the acronym, stands for the President's Roadmap to Empower Veterans and End a National Tragedy of Suicide. And both of those pieces doing are really important. Why? Because people who are empowered, people who feel like they have purpose, they have mission, people like that are much less likely to die by suicide. And we can talk more about that. The other half of that acronym, end a national tragedy of suicide, suicide is not just a concern in our military and veteran community.

Dr. Van Dahlen: (04:48) Suicide is on the rise in our nation. And in fact, suicide is now the second leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 35. 10.  10 year olds. And so this is an opportunity. Yes, our goal with some of the parts in particular, some of the funding that will eventually flow, so the research is very, very focused on veterans, but that's not all we're focusing on. This is an opportunity actually for our veterans and our military community to lead the way as we tackle suicide broadly. So this effort is an all hands on deck. It is about interagency coordination, collaboration. It's about working with our community partners, diving deep into our communities to ensure that we knit together efforts that are currently there. The last thing I'll say is that a piece of this work, and for me, perhaps the biggest piece, this is a public health approach. We've never done this before. We have never tried to address suicide on this massive scale from a public health approach.

Duane France:  (05:57) Right. And, and that's what I find interesting about this. It's all out there. All the resources are out there, but it's more of a facilitation role rather than, you know, somebody taking the lead. You know, we're all digging holes, but nobody's telling us where to dig the holes or how effectively to dig them together.

Dr. Van Dahlen: (06:18) Yes. Well, and I think to your point, the publi...

About The Show Hosts:

Duane France, MA, MBA, LPC is the Director of Veteran Services for the Family Care Center, a private mental health clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is also the Executive Director of the Colorado Veterans Health and Wellness Agency, a 501(c)3 nonprofit professionally affiliated with the Family Care Center.

Upon retiring from the Army after a twenty-two year career, including five combat and operational deployments, Mr. France began serving as a clinical mental health counselor in 2014. He is a member of the inaugural class of the George W. Bush Institute Veteran Leadership Program, a program that supports individuals from diverse sectors across the country who are motivated to increase their impact in helping our nation's veterans.

In addition to his clinical work, he also writes and speaks about veteran mental health in a wide variety of settings. He has presented at national conferences on mental health and wellness in the military population. He has authored three books, and is the founder and host of Head Space and Timing, a blog and podcast that brings the information from the clinical community to service members, veterans, and their families. He has been published in numerous local and national media outlets, and writes an online column for Counseling Today.

Dr. Shauna Springer is a licensed psychologist and nationally recognized expert on initiatives that benefit the military community. Known as “Doc Springer”, she is a trusted advisor for a vast network of veterans, military families and fellow thought leaders. Her uniquely perceptive insights have helped thousands of warriors reconnect with their tribe, strengthen their relationships, and build lives driven by their values. Dr. Springer’s work has been featured on NPR, NBC, CBS Radio, Military Times and Marine Corps Times.

She is co-author of the best-selling book, Beyond the Military, which explores the psychological, cultural and relational aspects of military transition and provides a comprehensive roadmap for successfully navigating life after military service. In addition, she has expertise in several critical, cutting edge subjects – for example – moral injury, approaching conversations about firearm safety, the links between survivor guilt, shame, and suicidal ideation, combining therapy with Stellate Ganglion Block (an innovative treatment for post-traumatic stress), the trust gap between warriors and civilian treatment providers, and the bond between those who serve in the military and their trusted healers.

Her next book WARRIOR: How to Support Those Who Protect Us has been endorsed by Academy Award Nominee and Author of the books Tribe and War, Sebastian Junger. WARRIOR will be published in Spring 2020.

Episode Transcript:

Duane France: 00:00   Welcome to the seeking the Military Suicide Solution Podcast brought to you by the Military Times. I'm Duane France

Shauna Springer:  00:06 And I'm Doc Shauna Springer

Duane France: 00:08   And we'd like to thank you for taking the time to join us to talk about an extremely important topic, suicide in the military affiliated population.

Duane France: 00:22   So this is the introductory episode of the show and you wanted to take a few minutes to tell you a bit about us, what brought us here and why this show at this point in time. To start off with, I'll tell you a little bit about me. My name is Duane France. I said I'm a retired Army Noncommissioned Officer, combat veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan and a clinical mental health counselor practicing in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In addition to my clinical work, I also write and speak about mental health and wellness on my blog and podcast, Head Space and Timing. In over 150 episodes of that show, the topic of suicide came up often. It started to come up so often that we decided to create this show to talk about that subject specifically. I'm joined by my cohost, Doc Springer. Shauna.

Shauna Springer: 01:06   Yes, thanks Duane. So I'm a licensed psychologist who's known as Doc Springer for my role as a trusted advisor in the military and veteran community. And in addition to spending years innovating in the area of suicide prevention, I have expertise in a number of topics that have not been well explored as yet. For example, moral injury, firearm safety conversations, and bridging the trust gap between veterans and civilian treatment providers. I've never served in the military, wouldn't want to represent that I did, but I had a pretty unconventional upbringing. That I'll talk about a little bit later in this episode that has helped veterans really feel like home to me and has really helped me feel comfortable working with those who have served in the military. I work has been featured on NPR, NBC, CBS radio, Military Times, and Marine Corps Times and I'm delighted to do this podcast series with Duane France, who I first met through the Head Space and Timing podcast. He does excellent interviews and I just thought what a thoughtful interview that was. And then when he asked me to cohost this with him, it just all kind of came together from there.

Duane France: 02:15   No, I really appreciate that. I think it was as I was thinking about the concept of this show, really wanting to bring someone on to to really, you know, parse some things out with and bounce some things off of. I really appreciated your willingness to come on and have the conversation.

Shauna Springer:  02:36   Yeah. You know, one of the things I really wanted to do in this episode is to give space for us to talk about how we came to this work. It's really important to me as we go through this process to interview guests that don't see this as just a job that really see this as a mission or a calling or something that is at least sacred work to them for some reason or another. And often there's a story behind what drives people to do this work in the first place. So I wanted to ask you, doing what brought you to this work? What's your story?

Duane France: 03:17   Everybody loves an origin story, right? Surprisingly, a pretty common question is, you know, how does a...I was not a mental health professional when I was in the army. I was actually in logistics. I made a choice 25 years ago now to to take the first thing smoking out of St Louis to be able to get out of my dad's basement and happened to be that particular MOS. And then opportunities over those 22 years I spent in the Army, I decided to do more crazy stuff like jumping out of airplanes and, you know, going to weird and exotic places like Turkey and Norway rather than changing my job. But I wasn't a mental health professional specifically. I wasn't a licensed clinician when I was in the army. When I do often say that it is somewhat similar to a Platoon Sergeant, a First Sergeant of, you know, "Hey Joe, what's going on?" And, and you know, "what's going on in your head?"

Duane France: 04:05   I always thought that I was going to be a high school teacher. Like you know, one of those English teachers or maybe a history teacher who, you know, the students could derail by asking war stories and not get any homework. And I had a Vietnam Vet teacher that we knew that if we got him talking about Vietnam, we could get out of homework. And, you know, I always saw myself doing something like that. And then some of the things in, I've talked about it, we will talk about ...