Career Connections
Introduction
My academic and professional direction is psychology, with a focus on veteran mental health and suicide risk underdetection, specifically how people minimize, indirectly express, or otherwise avoid revealing psychological distress. My professional background in military police service, leadership, training, conflict resolution, safety, documentation, and risk assessment supports this direction.
Career Direction
My career direction is clear: I am pursuing psychology as a path toward mental health services, with continued focus on veteran mental health, suicide risk underdetection, and how people remain functional while experiencing serious psychological distress. The purpose of my current preparation is not to discover a new field but to build the academic foundation and professional credentials this direction requires, along with the language the field expects. My coursework gives me a stronger theoretical foundation, grounded in research, for understanding distress, personality, social influence, and ethical practice, building on the professional background described above.
Curriculum Vitae
Curriculum vitae
Academic CV documenting education, research interests, submitted manuscripts, research activity, military service, honors, and selected professional experience.
Resume
Resume
Academic/professional resume highlighting preparation in psychology, research interests, leadership, training, crisis response, documentation, and risk assessment.
PTSD, Culture, Assessment, and Treatment
PSY 215 | Presentation
This presentation examines PTSD as a biopsychosocial disorder shaped by trauma, culture, assessment limits, and access to care, and it ties closely to my research focus on suicide risk underdetection among veterans. Building the assessment sections on the CAPS-5 and PCL-5 clarified how much clinical judgment still depends on disclosure, cultural fit, and clinician training even when standardized tools are in use. The cultural variation sections were the most useful for my career direction, since they underscored that trauma can be expressed through language, silence, or family and community framing that a standard assessment was never built to catch. Among veterans, service culture can discourage disclosure in the first place, adding a second barrier to the ones this presentation describes. The treatment and ethics sections, particularly duty to treat and do no harm, gave me language for the balance I want to bring to future clinical work: staying engaged with people whose cases are difficult, without pushing pacing or exposure past what is safe. Building this presentation strengthened my understanding of where standardized assessment stops and clinical judgment has to start, which is the exact gap my research is trying to address.