Over the past year, Old Dominion University has been placing graduate students in counseling with Fleet and Family Support Services in Norfolk, where interns work with military clients and their families. In 2024, Navy veteran Amanda Henderson was one of the first interns to go through the program.
“I jumped on it because I knew that my experiences in the military really help,” she said. ”So often, a big complaint that I hear is that civilian therapists might not be up to speed on military issues. I am.”
Henderson joined the Navy in 2014 and left during the pandemic in 2020. She spent most of her time as an intelligence officer, before ending her career at Naval Air Station Oceana, where she was helping sailors who were transitioning out of the Navy. Her internship was part of her last semester before she graduated from ODU with a master's in clinical mental health counseling.
“A lot of people joined the military with this hurt that they didn't heal from family generations,” she said. “They're getting thrown into a situation where it sometimes perpetuates that hurt. Sometimes it's a bunch of hurt people not knowing how to deal with their own stuff, and it bleeds into your daily life.”
The military grapples with a shortage of mental health providers. A 2024 study of over 2 million troops from the Department of Defense Management and Naval Postgraduate School found that sailors were less likely to receive mental health care when there were not adequate military providers available.
The sailors often didn’t receive adequate care, even when there was help available in the nearby community. The study found some of the problem was caused by roughly one third of private doctors not taking the military insurance Tricare.
But mental health counselors are also often not trained in the particular needs of military families. There are issues with military or sexual trauma, but the strain of long separations are hard on the sailor and their families, Henderson said.
“It's a different kind of stressor. I think a lot of people don't realize how hard it is to be gone and separated and then have to reconnect when you get back and act like none of that ever happened,” she said.
The interns work alongside established counselors at Navy Fleet and Family Services on a range of mental health issues from group therapy to crisis counseling. Several of the first students were either former military or military spouses, said Brittany Suggs, the graduate clinical coordinator for ODU’s counseling department.
She said ODU is training students to be “well rounded clinicians” including in “diagnosis and treatment, crisis intervention” so the large Navy population gives the university a window into a population that many of her students would not normally see.
After placing four interns in Norfolk, the university wants to expand to other Fleet and Family Service centers in the region, she said.
