Veteran Psychology IS Health Psychology

Consider the average veteran walking into a clinic for care, whether at a VA facility or, more often than not, somewhere else entirely. Chances are good that whoever sees them is not just meeting a psychiatric presentation. They are meeting a patient whose pain, sleep, cardiovascular health, cognition, and mood are already tangled together by years of physical demand and chronic stress. Put plainly: the average veteran seeking treatment is a health psychology patient more often than not. That is the case I want to make here, and I think it is one the Society for Health Psychology is especially well positioned to help others understand.

A Population Defined by Comorbidity

Health Psychology is based upon the Biopsychosocial Model, developed by Engel (1977), that understands illness and recovery occur in the context of biological, psychological, and social factors and their interaction. Veterans are, epidemiologically, close to a textbook case of that model in action. There is such a high prevalence of co-occurring Chronic Pain and PTSD within the veteran population that researchers now study these two conditions together as their own clinical phenotype (with an estimated 53% of veterans having PTSD also have chronic pain), and veterans suffering from both conditions demonstrate significantly poorer psychosocial functioning and psychiatric comorbidity compared to those suffering from either condition separately (Reed et al., 2024). Cardiovascular disease (CVD) represents a similar example: approximately one-quarter of veterans over 60 years of age receive a diagnosis of CVD and those experiencing both CVD and PTSD are found to experience increased rates of depressive (8-fold greater odds compared to those with no PTSD), anxiety, cognitive, and sleep disorders, as well as suicidal ideation (Arechiga et al., 2024; Yang et al., 2026). Adding in Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which affects one in four veterans (and comes with cognitive, mood and sleep symptoms), we see clearly that this overlap between medical and psychological needs amongst veterans is near-standard (Karr et al., 2025).

Not Just Special Operators

This overlap relates to a pattern described as “Operator Syndrome” by Frueh and colleagues (2020) at the University of Hawaii to describe the interrelated medical and behavioral health needs, traumatic brain injury effects, endocrine dysfunction, chronic pain, sleep disturbance, and more, seen in special operations forces after years of sustained physical and psychological demand. It is a useful clinical concept in this sense, but its scope is larger. The accumulated physiological toll from prolonged stress and physical exertion are still part of an underlying mechanism that applies in milder forms across the broader military population. This also must be considered alongside the military screening out many individuals with chronic disease at the outset. And yet, a disproportionate number leave with more chronic conditions than they carried in (e.g., twice the incidence of osteoarthritis of similarly aged civilians, and upwards of 20% have diagnosed hearing loss (Yedlinsky et al., 2019)). This is a population-level pattern in this community that ordinary clinical training in health psychology is already built to recognize, not an occupational niche.

Where Health Psychology Fits

Here is the part that I think matters most for this readership: most veterans are not primarily seen by providers who specialize in military or veteran care. Fewer than half of the roughly 18 million veterans in the United States receive care through the VA or a military treatment facility; the rest rely largely on civilian primary care and specialty systems (Yedlinsky et al., 2019). That means the health psychologist doing inpatient consultation-liaison work in a civilian academic medical center, or the outpatient provider managing a patient with diabetes and depression, is very likely already treating veterans, whether or not that status is ever named or screened for. Consultation-liaison psychology, my own corner of the field, is one clear example of where this shows up daily: the work of assessing and intervening on psychological factors that are inseparable from a patient’s medical course, in coordination with the rest of the care team (Yost & Cavanagh, 2025). But the relevance runs well beyond any one clinical niche. Wherever health psychologists already do biopsychosocial, interdisciplinary work, they are positioned to recognize and respond to veteran-specific patterns of comorbidity more capably than most of the systems currently serving this population. But capability and action are different things. Most civilian intake never asks about military service, so the clinician best equipped to use that history usually doesn’t have it.

None of this argument centers on the Society for Health Psychology becoming a veteran-focused organization, nor do I mean to suggest that this territory ‘belongs’ to us alone. Even within the APA, Division 19 (the Society for Military Psychology) does excellent work in the space, though largely oriented toward active-duty service members and operational contexts. Instead, I’d point out the great opportunity for collaboration between the divisions, including training and education (e.g., joint symposia on civilian practitioner development or creating practice briefs on understanding military service history in medical settings).

What I am suggesting is narrower and, I think, more actionable: veterans are already a health psychology population, whether we have named them as one or not, and our field has real expertise to offer both to the clinicians treating them and to the broader effort to understand what veteran health actually looks like. Recognizing the overlap is the first step. In practice this could include: adding military service history to intake in civilian medical settings, treating a veteran’s presenting complaint as a likely cluster rather than an isolated problem, and building veteran comorbidity patterns into how we train health psychology students who will spend their careers outside of veteran-branded settings. Ideally, a veteran with new cognitive complaints gets asked about blast and impact exposure before depression or attention dominates the differential, and a veteran whose chronic pain is not responding to standard behavioral treatment gets screened for the PTSD.