The Strength That Saves You Can Also Trap You
Military culture teaches you to carry weight. Yours, and then some. You learn to compartmentalize, to push through, to put the mission and the people next to you ahead of whatever is happening inside your own head. Those are not character flaws. They are survival skills, and in the right context they are extraordinary.
But skills built for the battlefield do not always translate to the living room. The same compartmentalization that lets you function under fire can keep you from telling your spouse that you have not slept a full night in months. The same self-reliance that made you dependable to your unit can convince you that needing help means you are failing the people who count on you.
I saw this pattern for years in the emergency department. Veterans rarely came in saying they were struggling. They came in with chest pain, with injuries, with a blood pressure reading that scared their primary care provider. The distress was underneath, and it only surfaced if someone took the time to ask, and asked in a way that did not feel like an accusation.
What Veterans Actually Taught Me
Here is the part that changed how I practice. The veterans who did eventually ask for help almost never framed it as asking for help. They framed it as maintenance. As readiness. As doing what needed to be done so they could keep showing up for their families, their jobs, their communities.
That reframe matters. Asking for help is not surrender. It is logistics. No one deploys without resupply. No one runs a mission without support elements. The strongest people I have ever cared for were not the ones who never needed anything. They were the ones who knew exactly what they needed and had the discipline to go get it.
Veterans also taught me that trust is earned in specifics, not slogans. A poster that says “It’s okay to not be okay” does very little. What works is a provider who understands the culture, who does not flinch at the details, who explains exactly what treatment involves and why, and who treats the veteran as the expert on their own life. Respect first. Everything else follows.
Why This Shapes the Way I Built My Practice
When I founded Parker Neuroscience, I made veterans, first responders, and healthcare providers a core focus, not a marketing line. These are populations trained to run toward problems and away from their own needs. They deserve care that meets them where they actually are.
Much of my work now involves interventional treatments, including IV ketamine and intranasal esketamine, for depression, PTSD, anxiety, and OCD that have not responded to standard approaches. For many veterans, “treatment resistant” is a label they carry like a verdict. It is not a verdict. It usually means the right tool has not been tried yet. The research on these interventions for PTSD and depression in veterans is some of the most encouraging work happening in mental health today, and it is one reason I will be presenting on this topic at the Nebraska Methodist College Behavioral Health Conference this November.
But the medicine is only part of it. The bigger shift is cultural. Care has to feel like a briefing, not a confession. Clear expectations, honest answers about what treatment can and cannot do, and a plan the patient helps build. That is what earns trust from people who have every reason to be skeptical.
If You Are the One Carrying It
Maybe you are reading this as a veteran, or as a first responder, or as the spouse of one. Here is what I want you to take from it.
You do not have to hit bottom to justify getting help. You do not have to have a diagnosis, a crisis, or a story that sounds serious enough. Not sleeping is enough. Feeling flat around your kids is enough. Being tired of white-knuckling it is enough.
And if you have tried before and it did not work, that is not evidence that nothing works. It is evidence that one thing did not work. There are more options now than there were even five years ago, and some of them are showing results in people who had stopped expecting results at all.
The mission is not over. It just changed. Taking care of the person who takes care of everyone else is not weakness. It is the most disciplined thing you will ever do.
Lisa Parker, DNP, APRN, NP is a veteran and the founder of Parker Neuroscience in Omaha, Nebraska, an interventional psychiatry practice specializing in IV ketamine and Spravato for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, anxiety, and OCD, with a focus on veterans, first responders, and healthcare providers. Learn more at parkerneuroscience.com or call 402-915-1862.