Q&A with Dr. Sonja Batten, Chief Clinical Officer of ROGER Wellness Services
Please tell us about ROGER Wellness Services’ mission.
Stop Soldier Suicide’s core service offering is its ROGER Wellness Program. Launched in 2019, this national, evidence-based package was designed by the country’s leading experts in military suicide prevention.
ROGER has three key features:
- Best-in-class client identification and acquisition methods. We find veterans and service members who need to be connected to care by using proprietary online keyword searches to target digital advertisements.
- Comprehensive suicide risk assessment. We use validated tools to effectively capture military history, trauma exposure, mental health, suicide attempt history, and specific plans for suicide while also building the therapeutic trust necessary to reduce risk.
- Empirically supported telemental health services. These are delivered by highly trained Wellness Coordinators. They employ validated tools to mitigate suicide risk (such as Crisis Response Plans), improve protective factors (especially by providing access to individualized resources), and comprehensively help meet the needs of veterans, service members and their families.
ROGER Wellness Program’s clinical telehealth services focus on evidence-based, suicide-specific care, utilizing effective psychotherapy protocols such as Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) and Brief Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention (BCBT-SP). In addition, the SSS Resource, Referral, and Benefits Coordinators (RRBCs) connect clients with tailored and vetted resources in each client’s community.
Please share how you got involved in working with veterans.
I’m one of those fortunate people who knew what type of career I wanted from an early age. Trite as it may sound, I have always been passionate about helping people and making the world a better place. In fact, I began my first job working in mental health just 10 days before my 21st birthday, and even then it was clear to me that this would be my path. I took a summer job at the Reno VA Medical Center mostly because it was the only summer job I could find that was relevant to my psychology training. But I immediately fell in love with working with the veterans there (no surprise with veterans in my family going all the way back to a Hessian conscript who was an aide to Cornwallis), and I slowly shifted my focus from working with survivors of interpersonal violence to specializing in working with veterans who had experienced trauma in the military.
Fast forward, and I am now a seasoned mental health leader with decades of experience working on veteran mental health across multiple sectors, including the federal government, academia, the nonprofit sphere, and the private sector. At my broadest level of impact, I guided policy for over 20,000 VA mental health professionals operating within a $7.5 billion service line budget. Now, I’m back to my roots, as Chief Clinical Officer at Stop Soldier Suicide, where I guide our team of dedicated professionals who are saving lives in our ROGER Wellness Center every day.
How does your organization’s mission overlap with the goals and mission of the Veteran Wellness Alliance – to support veterans and their families in their mental and brain health care journeys?
Our program is designed to address the highest levels of suicide risk head-on through suicide-specific therapy, ensuring that our clients’ socioeconomic needs are being met through resourcing, and connecting clients to additional medical and mental health treatment and social support as needed.
Our ROGER team is licensed and highly trained to provide suicide-specific care. They are also culturally competent within the military community. The majority of them have served in the military or are part of a military family.
Tell us about the importance of community and connection in wellness.
I think of the current suicide epidemic in our country not as an outgrowth of mental illness, but as an outcome of too little connectedness. We can get through anything if we are not alone – and I do think that, ironically, our smartphones theoretically bring us closer together practically but perhaps also make us less and less meaningfully connected to one another. Community can be defined in so many ways, including family and chosen family. As a resident of New Orleans, I see every day how a strong and vibrant community contributes to both individual and group wellness. There’s no better community than the beautiful, creative people here in New Orleans who are always there to support their neighbors through adversity and joy.
What are you most looking forward to or what gives you hope for the future of wellness in the veteran and military service space?
After nearly 30 years of working with veterans professionally, here’s what I’ve learned: their leadership under pressure, commitment to the mission, deep sense of camaraderie, and sharp humor are core to who they are. They’re resourceful, resilient, and committed to the greater good.
They’re my close friends, my dad, my colleagues, my uncles, my beloved cousin Marty, my favorite clients, and they’re who I’d want next to me in times of crisis.
That being said, it’s important to acknowledge that military service can also sometimes come with serious mental health challenges, proven by one of the leading causes of death among veterans: suicide.
Ignoring the challenges of the veteran experience would do a disservice to the truth – but so would focusing on the problems alone. Veterans’ strengths and challenges exist side by side, and addressing one without the other fails to capture what it means to serve.
Veterans deserve to be recognized for ALL that they are: resilient, multifaceted, and human.
Learn more about the Veteran Wellness Alliance.
