Main Street Counseling Makes Services More Accessible to Veterans

Steve Margeotes, Executive Director & Founder of Main Street Counseling, discuss how the organization is making counseling services more accessible to veterans. Margeoetes also explains the importance of offering anger management and batterers intervention groups for vets who are having difficulty controlling emotions.

11/18/17 #122

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Steve Adubato here. We are pleased to be joined by our good friend... I've lost count the number of times you've been with us! Many times! Every time is valuable. He is Dr. Steve Margeotes, who is Executive Director and Founder of Main Street Counseling. We were talking about veterans as part of this long-term series Help For our Heroes, what kind of mental health issues do most veterans and their family members, Steve, deal with? A few things. There's depression, there's social withdrawal, there's an overreaction which happens a lot of times with anger... What do you mean an overreaction to anger? Well sometimes they're mad for what they've experienced and sometimes that comes out in different situations. We had a vet recently who went into a store, and they asked him if he was a veteran, and he overreacted. "What difference does that make?" "Why did he ask me if I'm a veteran?" Truth was they asked him because it was a discount if you were a veteran. Wow. So situations like that, kind of like road rage, and you see that somebody overreacted in the situation. Sometimes it's difficult with authority figures, okay, to deal with them. That could be bosses, with spouses, parenting issues, money issues, conflict issues. And while that's... but the ones we've been seeing at Main Street Counseling, those are some of the issues. We run parent... we run anger management groups, and a lot of vets are coming in through the anger management group to deal with their reactions to situations. Do most veterans, Steve, know? Are they aware that there's some sort of problem? That they do need help? Or... I know it's not one or the other but, or is it that someone else picks it up and tries to facilitate getting a veteran into help? It's more the spouse. It's more the spouse? It's more the spouse who calls first at Main Street. We had great luck over the last couple of years with spouses coming in first for individual help and then bringing the vet in to do couples work. So if I had to say if it was one or the other, it's the spouse more than you know, you... I see you're different. I know you're different. I know you, what you went through. So it's the spouse more than the vet, in our experience, who's come into Main Street. So right now the spouse says... these significant others, those who are closest to veterans watching this series right now, they see something? They see an overreaction, or what they perceive to be a consistent overreaction to a certain situation..."