Western Interstate Commission For Higher Education (WICHE)
Behavioral Health Program
The Behavioral Health Program of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE-BHP) was an early partner with the Citizen Soldier Support Program. WICHE BHP was seeing an emergence of need for community based providers to better understand the needs of returning Guard, Reserve, and Veteran populations who were increasingly seeking care. Community providers of behavioral health, primary care, and allied health services in many cases were unprepared for this influx of demand. The pace of deployment of Guard and Reserve personnel was unprecedented, during Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom especially, and these personnel were presenting in local clinical settings where staff were often ill-prepared to meet their post-service healthcare needs, let alone understand their experience. In many cases, local providers were not even asking about service in the military, let alone about combat exposure to physical or psychological trauma.
The CSSP offered an array of resources from in-person training to videos, which helped providers better orient to serving those who have served, or in the case of Guard/Reserve were still serving. The data and mapping resources were unparalleled in supporting developing a local-picture of the potential need.
WICHE and CSSP partnered on a range of activities to sustain the effort, and extend the reach of the CSSP resources, conducting community training events in multiple Western states (AZ, CO, UT, WY), as well as supporting a focus on serving Guard, Reserve, and Veteran’s at the annual Carter Center Symposium on Mental Health in Atlanta and sessions at several yearly conferences of the National Association for Rural Mental Health and the National Rural Health Association. The WICHE-CSSP partnership provided access to training for several hundred rural mental health and allied health workers across the United States.
Beyond the initial partnership, CSSP informed multiple WICHE BHP efforts. Two efforts stand out. The first was an NIMH funded study of the utility on embedding Mental Health First Aid Training with National Guard personnel to improve mental health literacy, reduce stigma, and increase a willingness to help a fellow service member with mental health needs. The study showed such training worked, and a copy of a related research article is available in Military Medicine.
The second was the development of a community-based Veteran led approach to rural Veteran Suicide Prevention. This effort, Together with Veterans, is a partnership between the Rocky Mountain MIRECC and WICHE, funded by the VA Office of Rural Health. The lessons learned through the CSSP partnership, around activating, and building efforts at the community-level, permeate the TWV effort and have been essential to its success in rural communities and regions from New Hampshire to Guam, Alaska to Arizona!
WICHE Behavioral Health Program
3035 Center Green Drive, Suite 200Boulder, CO 80301