Core Mental Health Clinician Capacity and Use Rates in the US Military

Importance

Active duty service members have higher mental health stress and cannot choose where to live. It is imperative to understand how geographic access may be associated with their ability to obtain mental health treatment and how the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with these patterns.

Objective

To identify changes in the prevalence and intensity of mental health care use when service members experienced changes in core mental health clinician (defined to include psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, clinical psychologists and social workers, and marriage and family therapists) capacity in their communities and whether patterns changed from before to after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design, Setting, and Participants

This retrospective cohort study of the active duty population between January 1, 2016, and December 31, 2022, was conducted using individual fixed-effects models to estimate changes in the probability of mental health care visits and visit volume when a person moved across communities with adequate core mental health clinician capacity (≥1 clinician/6000 beneficiaries), shortage areas (<1 clinician/6000 beneficiaries), and areas with 0 clinicians within a 30-minute drive time. All US active duty service members stationed in the continental US, Hawaii, and Alaska were included. Data were analyzed from January through July 2024.

Main Outcomes and Measures

The first set of outcomes captured the probability of making at least 1 mental health care visit in a given quarter; the second set of outcomes captured the intensity of visits (ie, the number of visits log transformed).

Results

This study included 33,039,840 quarterly observations representing 2,461,911 unique active duty service members from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force (1,959,110 observations among Asian or Pacific Islander [5.9%], 5,309,276 observations among Black [16.1%], 5,287,168 observations among Hispanic [16.0%], and 18,739,827 observations among White [56.7%] individuals; 27,473,563 observations among males [83.2%]; mean [SD] age, 28.20 [7.78] years). When an active duty service member moved from a community with adequate capacity at military treatment facilities to one with 0 clinicians within a 30-minute drive, the probability of a mental health visit to any clinician decreased by 1.13 percentage points (95% CI, -1.21 to -1.05 percentage points; equivalent to a 11.6% relative decrease) and the intensity of total visits was reduced by 7.7% (95% CI, -9.0% to -6.5%). The gap increased from before to after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 8.5% (equivalent to -0.82 percentage points [95% CI, -0.92 to -0.73 percentage points]) to 16.2% (equivalent to -1.58 percentage points [95% CI, -1.70 to -1.46 percentage points]) in the probability of visiting any clinician type for mental health.

Conclusions and Relevance

In this study, active duty personnel assigned to locations without core military mental health clinicians within a 30-minute drive time were less likely to obtain mental health care and had fewer mental health care visits than those in communities with adequate military mental health capacity even if there was adequate coverage from the civilian sector. The care disparity increased after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.