The Veteran Supported Education Service Treatment Manual: VetSEd

FOREWORD
By Walter Penk, PhD, ABPP
Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences,
Texas A&M Health Sciences Center College of Medicine
and
Consultant, VA VISN 17 Center of Excellence on Research
for Returning War Veterans.
Ellison, et al., VetSEd Treatment Manual
Psychosocial rehabilitation techniques have long been considered beneficial for
promoting recovery from trauma and stress. However, such techniques have not been
sufficiently validated (Penk & Flannery, 2000; Glynn, Drebing, & Penk, 2009).
Insufficient validation may be attributed, in part, to the fact that, while theories are strong
and deeply embedded within our American cultures, psychosocial rehabilitations often
times have lacked operational practices to guide those delivering, as well as those
receiving, such services.
The Veteran Supported Education Treatment Manual provided here removes all such
insufficiencies for using education as a family of psychosocial rehabilitation techniques
for coping with trauma. Such "choose, get, keep" educational approaches specified here
began long ago in interventions pioneered by William Anthony, Karen Danley, Sally
Rogers, Marianne Farkas, and LeRoy Spaniol in the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation
at Boston University (e.g., Jansen, Farkas, & Penk, 2007)
It should not be surprising that such educational remedies come from Boston, that "city
on a hill," as seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop called
Boston, paraphrasing the Psalms, the city that remains, to this day, the academic center
for the United States of America.
For, as embodied in the Boston-born GI Bill of 1944--i.e., legislation to educate World
War II combat veterans now incorporated in the new Post 9/11 GI Bill of 2009 for Iraqi
and Afghanistan war veterans--the United States of America, once again, is using
education as a road for recovery after a decade of war since 9/11 and the great recession
that followed. And the road to travel is modeled, in part, on the Servicemen's
Readjustment Act of 1944, co-authored by Edith Nourse Rogers, and signed into law as
the GI Bill by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on June 22, 1944.
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