Reculturation: A new perspective on military-civilian transition stress

ABSTRACT

Various forms of assistance are offered to help US Veterans achieve success in their post-military lives in recognition of their service. Despite the many successes, a significant number of Veterans continue to remain at risk for negative mental health outcomes, including suicidality and low levels of life satisfaction. These findings may be due to challenges arising from cultural identity dissonance. Problematic strategies used by Veterans to reduce this dissonance can result in a lack of belongingness, a key component in Joiner’s Interpersonal Theory of Suicide. The authors suggest that research on the immigrant experience of acculturation may provide a new perspective to better understand issues of identity and sense of belonging in Veterans. Given that most Veterans return to the culture in which they grew up, the authors offer the term “reculturation.” The authors propose clinical psychology focus on exploring the reculturation process of Veterans to support program engagement and suicide prevention.

KEYWORDS:

• Veterans
• suicide prevention
• military-civilian gap
• reintegration
• acculturation
• belonging

Disclosure statement

We have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.