Use of College Mental Health Services Among Student Veterans

Background and Purpose: Many military service members and veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will be using Post 9/11 GI Bill education benefits to attend post-secondary institutions. Many will likely have mental health needs at some point during their time on campus but are not likely to access services through the Department of Defense or the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare systems; rather, they will look to access private sources including college/university campus health centers. This study was guided by Andersen’s (1968) Behavioral Model of Healthcare Utilization and examined the prevalence of campus mental health service use among student service member/veterans who accessed campus mental health services. Our study addressed the following research questions: 1) What is the prevalence of campus mental health service use among student veterans? 2) What characteristics are associated with the use of campus mental health service among student veterans?

Methods: Data came from the fall 2011 National College Health Assessment II, conducted by the American College Health Association. The survey is administered twice a year using volunteer samples of college students from numerous colleges and universities across the United States. The fall 2011 sample comprised 27,774 students from 44 post-secondary institutions. For the current study, our sample comprised 706 student who reported membership in the United States Armed Services veterans who were predominately white (75%) males (66%) enrolled in undergraduate coursework (82%) with about half (48%) of them having deployed for hazardous duty while serving in the military. Two-sample proportion and mean tests were used to compare covariates by use of campus mental health services. Given the small number of cases (n = 45) with missing data, we dropped them from the regression analyses resulting in a sample size of 661. Logistic regression with a clustered sandwich estimator was used to model the associations between the covariates and use of campus mental health services. The area under the ROC curve and the Hosmer-Lemeshow chi-square were calculated to assess model fit. All statistical analyses were performed with Stata 13 for Windows.

Results: Results of logistic regression revealed that the majority of student veterans that reported using campus mental health services were undergraduate or married student veterans. Student veterans were likely to use campus mental health services if they reported either deploying for hazardous duty or negative mental health symptoms.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings highlight the high prevalence of campus mental health service use among student veterans on college/university campuses. Findings also reveal that the majority of these students are reporting a myriad of negative mental health symptoms. Understanding the relationship between mental health symptoms and use of campus mental health services with the growing number of student veterans can assist post-secondary institutions prepare for the growing number of student veterans while increasing the likelihood that other military members and veterans will want to enroll as students.