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Now on the medical front, there’s been a big push in the Defense Department
for quality mental health care.
Multiple deployments and a high operational tempo place stressors on military families
and they may feel they need to talk to someone about their situation.
Now that help is out there and it’s been out there
but sometimes getting access to that help is the real challenge, until now.
I’m here with Staff Sergeant Brian Buckwalter who talked to Deputy Director
at TRICARE recently about new ways of providing mental health care
no matter where you are.
Now tell me Staff Sergeant, what is that all about?
Well, I talked to REAR Admiral Christine Hunter,
she is the Deputy Director for the TRICARE Management Activity
and she basically, what you said, access to care is the most important thing.
There’s a lot of beneficiaries out there that don’t live anywhere near a medical,
a military medical treatment facility, so they’re trying to come up with new ways to provide mental health care.
One of these is called TRIAP, the TRICARE Assistance Program.
This essentially is if you have a webcam and an internet connection,
you can get access informal to informal counseling anywhere in the world.
Now, one of the reasons I understand,
that they’re offering this informal web counseling so to speak,
is because of the stigma that has been inadvertently attached
to mental health care in the military
and we have a bite from one of your, from your interview with Admiral Hunter.
Take a look.
There is no medical diagnosis made
and the results of this session are not entered into your medical record.
That’s why it becomes important, if there is a serious medical condition, to refer.
But in the meantime, you will enjoy a level of privacy which we think
will allow more people to come forward and get help when they have concerns.
Well that counseling sounds pretty informal.
What about something more serious like suicide?
Well they do have a next step and it’s also through teleconference if you so choose.
It’s called the Telemental Health Program and
that is a more formal version of counseling and
we’ll be talking about that in future episodes of our show this week in the Pentagon.
As a matter of fact, you can see that entire interview
with Admiral Hunter on the latest edition
of This Week in the Pentagon which premieres Friday at 1600 eastern.