Dr. Harold Kudler trained at Yale and is Associate Clinical Professor at Duke. He has received teaching awards from the Duke Department of Psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association. From 2002 to 2010, Dr. Kudler coordinated mental health services for a three state region of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and from 2000 through 2005 co-chaired VA’s Special Committee on PTSD which reports to Congress. He founded the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies’ (ISTSS) PTSD Practice Guidelines taskforce and serves on the ISTSS Board of Directors. He co-led development of the joint VA/Department of Defense guideline for the management of posttraumatic stress and serves as advisor to Sesame Street’s Talk Listen Connect series for military families. Since 2006, he has co-led the North Carolina Governor’s Focus on Returning Military Members and their Families. Dr. Kudler is Associate Director of the VA’s Mid-Atlantic Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC) for Deployment Mental Health and Medical Lead for the VISN 6 Rural Health Initiative.
Dr. Kudler will be presenting a breakout session entitled: “Building DoD/VA/State and Community Partnerships: A Public Health Approach to the Mental Health Needs of Service Members, Veterans and their Families.”
Many Americans continue to believe that going to war is the province of the military and that, if Service Members, Veterans and their families face significant stress and, sometimes, frank mental health problems in the course of the deployment cycle and thereafter, this will “be taken care of” within the Department of Defense (DoD) or the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). This presentation will demonstrate that when our nation goes to war, the effects reverberate in every county of our nation and across generations. There is a need to recognize going to war as a public health issue and create partnerships between DoD, VA, States and Communities that meet the deployment-related needs of Service Members, Veterans and their families. Participants will learn about ongoing partnerships in North Carolina and other states and consider how members of the clergy, lay leaders, and congregational members can best participate.
