Assignment:
To complete this assignment, select a local, state, or federal policy that targets the form of oppression and discrimination you described in Week 2 (please refer to week 2 assignment at the bottom of this assignment (for example, the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), Veterans Millennium Healthcare Act, Affordable Care Act (ACA), Adoption and Safe Families Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Temporary Aid to Needy Families Act, Social Security Act, or a relevant state or local policy, such as state or local affordable housing policies or health and safety policies related to COVID-19). Need Assignment Help?
Then, complete the following:
1. Describe the purpose of a currently enacted policy that addresses the social justice problem for a chosen population, using scholarly literature for support.
- Remember, this policy must be enacted-in other words, it must be passed legislation.
2. Describe the programs and services provided through the policy, using scholarly literature for support.
- What are examples of the programs and services that are being offered as a result of your chosen policy?
- Who is the target population for these programs and services?
3. Describe how the policy connects to the chosen social justice problem, using scholarly literature for support.
- Connect the policy to the social justice problem you selected by giving a brief description of the problem. Is it a new problem, something that has recently arisen, or an old problem that has never been resolved?
4. Describe the historical issues and context that led to the creation of the social problem and policy development.
- Include information about the voting outcomes for the policy and the legislative leaders who influenced the policy historically and in the present.
- Include the impact these historical features have had on the policy's implementation.
Additional Requirements:
The assignment you submit is expected to meet the following requirements:
- Written communication: Written communication is free of errors that detract from the overall message.
- APA formatting: Resources and citations are formatted according to current APA style and formatting standards.
- Cited resources: A minimum of five scholarly sources. Most literature cited should be current, with publication dates within the past five years.
- Length of paper: 4 typed, double-spaced pages.
- Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12 point.
Week 2 Assignment
Oppression and Discrimination in Veterans' Mental Health.
Veterans are highly vulnerable to mental health disparity. They also go through discrimination, inequity, and lack access to care at the same time. This especially happens to individuals from minorities. Studies have also continuously revealed that Black, Hispanic, and Latinx veterans are more likely to experience the most severe forms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety symptoms than their White counterparts (Nillni et al., 2023).
Racial discrimination is not the only means of oppression that veterans face. Sexual orientation is a compounding stressor faced by LGBQ+ veterans, such as discrimination in military culture and healthcare environments (Harper et al., 2023). Bisexual veterans in particular report the most psychiatric distress of any group of sexual orientation, and with significantly more acute PTSD, depression, and anxiety than heterosexual veterans(Harper et al., 2023).
Ethical Considerations and Implications for Social Work Practice
NASW can help people who work with veterans' mental health navigate the intricate ethical climate. The main principle that guides social workers to doubt the structural inequality and to advocate equality in terms of access to the services is social justice (NASW, 2021).This responsibility is particularly applicable to veteran care, in which access will be determined by race, income, geography, gender, and sexual orientation. It is the ethical responsibility of social workers to identify and intervene in how these factors contribute to the barriers to mental health treatment.
Another field of ethical requirement in the NASW Code of Ethics is cultural competence. Social workers should be familiar with the cultures and lives of their veteran clients, with the specifics of military culture that define help-seeking as a sign of weakness (Randles & Finnegan, 2022). The stigma of receiving mental health care, which is based on internalized, envisaged, and externalized stigmatization, is an important ethical obstacle as it makes people unable to obtain the services to which they have the right. Social workers should also undertake the initiative to eliminate the stigma by practicing in a culturally aware manner, engaging in outreach and advocacy (NASW, 2021). Moreover, there is the moral concept of self-determination, which states that the veterans are to be helped to define their needs and the preferred paths of care, as well as the informal channels of help, such as peer networks. The ethical issue has a practice implication of being affirmative, inclusive, and culturally responsive care is not a best practice; it is a duty of the profession. This failure to provide such care endangers to perpetuate the exploitation that social work is meant to eradicate.
Current Enacted Policies Addressing Veterans' Mental Health
There are also several federal level policies in place to govern mental health care amongst veterans. The VA MISSION Act of 2018 made the veterans more accessible to the community providers of care when inaccessible or unavailable VA facilities (Lafferty et al., 2023). The VA MISSION Act has granted veterans to access outside of the VA Care as long as they meet some of the required eligibility provisions, such that the veterans are not geographically and logistically secluded to access mental health care. The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022 further broadened the VA healthcare eligibility to the individuals who had been exposed to toxic substances(McAndrew et al., 2024).
The VA operates the Veterans Crisis Line, and funds the National Center on PTSD responsible of conducting research and disseminating evidence based treatment of PTSD and other associated ailments. The VA has also developed several LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinators within the centers around the country to reduce barriers in care due to identity. The aim of these coordinators is to provide holistic, supportive care to LGBQ+ veterans, who face barriers unique to them, including having faced discrimination in the military and health care facilities (Harper et al., 2023). In addition, there are the collaborative suicide prevention plans by the U.S. Department of Defense and VA, which is a subset of the National Strategy to Prevent Veteran Suicide since mental health crisis among the veterans require a population-specific response.
Policy Impact, Limitations and Activism.
Despite such policy efforts, massive loopholes still exist in attempting to address the intersectional mental health disparities of the veterans. Research has indicated that the policies targeting access have been unsuccessful in mitigating the underlying social factors like discrimination and income inequality leading to mental health disparities in racial and ethnic minority veterans (Nillni et al., 2023). The VA MISSION Act has expanded access theoretically, but the reality of access like transportation, long wait lines, and doubts about civilian ability to take care of veterans remain barriers to effectiveness, particularly among veterans in marginalized groups (Randles and Finnegan, 2022). Moreover, the policies have tend to be designed in a way that favors the average male veteran and female veterans and LGBTQ+ veterans have been underserved. Particularly, bisexual veterans are less willing to obtain formal assistance of medical practitioners and more willing to rely on internet-based sources, which implies that the existing healthcare-driven policies are not able to access this population (Harper et al., 2023).
Additional policy constraints include community-based mental health services are not funded, longitudinal research investigations of the long-term effects of discrimination on the well-being of veterans, and the absence of a mandatory cultural competency training among mental health service providers who work with various groups of veterans.Effective advocacy strategies that have demonstrated effectiveness are stigma reduction campaigns that incorporate the personal narratives of veterans who have used mental health services, peer support programs that employ military camaraderie as an agent of help-seeking, and healthcare provider training on veteran-specific and identity-affirming care (Randles & Finnegan, 2022). These strategies comply with NASW ethical standards as they focus on the dignity and value of veterans as individuals.
The main issue with present advocacy activities is that they tend to primarily work at the organizational level without creating the systemic policy change that would help to address the structural determinants of the veteran mental health disparities. The answer to these problems is to initiate macro level advocacy that exerts pressure on laws that requires a cultural competency training program, increased funding to facilitate the conduct of intersectional research, and a policy that makes equity the foundation of VA service delivery. Particular outreach efforts through digital platforms may be particularly helpful among disadvantaged subgroups, such as bisexual veterans, who are likely to be able to find information online (Harper et al., 2023). Lastly, effective promotion of the mental health among veterans should be committed towards addressing the discrimination and inequality that the existing policies, despite being in place, has failed to address.
References:
Harper, K. L., Herbitter, C., Livingston, N. A., Vogt, D., Iverson, K., Nillni, Y. I., &Galovski, T. (2023). Experiences of discrimination and mental health treatment seeking among LGBQ+ veterans. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity.
Lafferty, M., Govier, D. J., Golden, S. E., Disher, N. G., Hynes, D. M., &Slatore, C. G. (2023). VA-delivered or VA-purchased care: important factors for veterans navigating care decisions. Journal of general internal medicine, 38(7), 1647-1654.
McAndrew, L. M., Burgo-Black, L., Hunt, S. C., Kossoudji, A., Mains, K. C., Shuping, E., & Llorente, M. D. (2026). Exposure-informed care: why it's important and how the veterans affairs does it. Medical Care, 64(2S).
NationalAssociationofSocialWorkers.(2021).NASWcodeofethics.
Nillni, Y. I., Horenstein, A., McClendon, J., Duke, C. C., Sawdy, M., &Galovski, T. E. (2023). The impact of perceived everyday discrimination and income on racial and ethnic disparities in PTSD, depression, and anxiety among veterans. PLOS ONE, 18(9), e0291965.
Randles, R., & Finnegan, A. (2022). Veteran help-seeking behaviour for mental health issues: a systematic review. BMJ mil Health, 168(1).