Each May, Mental Health Awareness Month encourages conversation about conditions that affect millions of Americans. The difficult reality is that access to care remains uneven, provider shortages persist, and many communities, particularly veterans and military families, face barriers that are both structural and cultural.
Mental Health Awareness Month should challenge us to think beyond visibility campaigns. Awareness without workforce development, clinical training opportunities and cross-sector partnership cannot resolve persistent access gaps. Public institutions, clinics, health systems and community providers are critical actors in this ecosystem.
Mental health organizations that choose to train, develop and supervise graduate students in partnership with clinical mental health counseling programs such as the one at William & Mary are not administrative formalities; they are investments in Virginia’s future mental health capacity. By supporting counseling trainees — particularly those with military experience or specialized preparation — clinics directly strengthen the commonwealth’s ability to meet growing demand.
The commonwealth is home to one of the nation’s largest populations of veterans, active-duty service members and military families. These communities carry distinctive experiences shaped by service, transition, mobility and, for some, trauma. While public understanding of veteran mental health has grown in recent years, the demand for clinicians equipped to navigate military culture, reintegration stress and service-related complexities continues to exceed supply.
Mental health challenges within veteran populations are also workforce and infrastructure issues. Effective care requires providers who understand the lived contexts of military service. Cultural competence in this domain is not a supplemental skill. It is often decisive in building trust, sustaining therapeutic relationships, and improving outcomes.
Recognizing this reality, Virginia has taken meaningful steps to invest in the preparation of future clinicians. Targeted allocations from the Virginia General Assembly have supported programs designed to strengthen the behavioral health workforce. These investments reflect strategic foresight: expanding access to mental health care requires expanding the pipeline of well-trained providers.
At William & Mary, this support has enabled specialized training pathways such as the military and veteran counseling track, which prepares clinicians to serve veteran and military-connected populations with greater cultural fluency and clinical confidence. As the only program of its kind in Virginia, W&M’s concentration in military and veteran counseling — accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) — was developed in direct response to a recognized gap in behavioral health services for a population facing distinctive challenges: PTSD, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, the emotional weight of physical injury, prolonged family separation and the difficult transition from military to civilian life.
Many students at W&M in the military and veteran counseling track are either veterans, military spouses or the children of military families. Current students include: the adult child of a long-time Army JAG officer; an Air Force spouse and Navy mother; a former Navy master-at-arms; two honorably retired career U.S. Coast Guard noncommissioned officers, and several students who grew up in and around military households, many of whom have siblings serving around the globe.
Veterans and military-connected students entering counseling professions bring distinctive strengths to mental health settings. Providers often serve not only as clinicians, but as translators between cultures. Students in the W&M program are prepared through a carefully sequenced blend of foundational counseling courses, specialized military-focused electives (including Military Life, Culture and Challenges and Assessment and Treatment of Trauma-Related Disorders), and closely supervised clinical experiences with military and veteran clients. The underlying conviction of the program is straightforward: Effective counseling for this population demands not just clinical skill but genuine cultural fluency, and the program is built to produce counselors who bring both.
Awareness is a beginning, and the call to action is clear. Virginia’s behavioral health providers and clinical organizations should deepen partnerships with public universities, expand high-quality training opportunities, and recognize the strategic importance of cultivating clinicians prepared to serve veteran and military communities. Together we can build pipelines and grow capacity through partnership.
Retired Navy Capt. Kathleen Jabs of Williamsburg serves as the special assistant for military & veteran affairs to the president of William & Mary. David Gosling, Ph.D., of Charlottesville, an Army veteran, professor and counselor educator at William & Mary’s School of Education, prepares future clinicians, including veterans themselves, for careers in mental health care.