Terri Tanielian speaking at the Invictus Games Symposium on Invisible Wounds in 2016. Tanielian (CAS’90) is now Special Assistant to the President for Veterans Affairs, helping meet the needs of veterans, their families, and caregivers. Photo from the George W. Bush Presidential Center/Flickr, courtesy of Tanielian

Veterans

Serving Those Who Have Served in Uniform

As Special Assistant to the President for Veterans Affairs, Terri Tanielian (CAS’90) is working to support former military service members and their families

For Terri Tanielian, service started at home. 

Her father, Leonard Baxter, served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. His military service ended before she was born, and like many of his generation, he rarely—if ever—spoke about his experience, she says. Still, Tanielian (CAS’90) became curious about the ways that military service impacts those who serve, and the generations of people who follow them. 

From her vantage point at the White House, where she is Special Assistant to the President for Veterans Affairs, Tanielian is now in a position to help meet the specific needs of millions of veterans, their families, and caregivers. 

“This is my public service,” she says. “I did not serve in the military, but my dad did, and so did many of my friends and colleagues. Seeing the service and sacrifice that they have made on behalf of all of us for our freedom is really inspiring. And so to be able to continue to focus on how to support them—and ensure that we’re doing all we can to improve their quality of life while they wear a uniform, and ensure their quality of life and their longevity when they take off their uniform—is really important to me and to the people I work with.” 

Tanielian, who was born in upstate New York, graduated from Boston University with a bachelor’s in psychology. She worked as a school counselor for a while, before realizing that she wanted to have a broader impact—something “at scale,” she says. 

So, she returned to school, earning a master’s in psychology from American University in 1994. She soon became the associate director of research at the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the country’s main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world.  

After four years at the APA, she joined the RAND Corporation as a senior behavioral scientist. The global policy think tank specializes in research and analysis for US defense, although it also assists government agencies with nondefense research in such fields as healthcare and social welfare programs. 

(Tanielian isn’t the only notable BU alum with ties to the RAND Corporation: the late Frederick S. Pardee (Questrom’54,’54, Hon.’06), BU’s Pardee School of Global Studies benefactor, was also a RAND Corporation alumnus. He started the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School there, the first school to offer a doctoral program in public policy.) 

It was at RAND that Tanielian honed her focus on service members, veterans, and their families. She examined military and veterans health policy, military suicide, sexual assault in the military, and the psychological effects of combat, terrorism, and disasters. She led a number of studies to assess the needs of veterans and to examine the ability of private healthcare providers to deliver timely, high-quality care to veterans and their families. She also examined community-based models for expanding mental-health care for returning veterans and their families. In 2004, she became the director of RAND’s Center for Military Health Policy Research. 

Throughout two decades at the RAND Corporation, Tanielian led dozens upon dozens of studies that examined veterans’ access to quality healthcare—she has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications to her name. 

But perhaps the most consequential of these was the 2008 study—“The Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery”—that called attention to what Tanielian and her coauthors refer to as “the invisible wounds of war”: the psychological, cognitive, and emotional consequences of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in particular. 

The findings by Tanielian, codirector of the study, and her team are staggering: nearly 20 percent of military service members who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression, but only about half sought treatment. Why? The researchers found something of a perfect storm brewing. Veterans, worried that seeking out mental-health services could impact their job prospects or their reputations, often avoided treatment. And even those who did seek it out, the researchers found, encountered confounding gaps in government and private-sector services. 

“There are service programs and benefits across the federal government—whether it’s in the Department of Health and Human Services, or the Department of Labor, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or the Department of Education—everyone has a role in providing some kind of post-service benefits,” Tanielian says. “When we did that study, it was like ripping the Band-Aid off.” 

The report sent shockwaves through Washington, and Tanielian was called upon to testify about her team’s findings before both the House of Representatives and the Senate committees on veterans affairs, as well as to field the slew of news media interviews that followed. 

“For better or worse, we got a lot of media attention from that report,” she says. “But an important part of my career has always been that it’s not enough to name the problem—we have to address it.” 

To address these intertwined and far-reaching issues, Tanielian and the other RAND Corporation researchers recommended that the military create a system that would allow veterans to receive confidential mental-health services. They also found an urgent need for better mental-health care training throughout providers in the US healthcare system—and specific training about military trauma for healthcare providers treating active-duty and veteran service members. 

Part of Tanielian’s job now is to help weave together the disparate veterans services functions throughout the federal government into a cohesive safety net. “It’s the full federal family that needs to come forward to support our troops—while they’re in uniform and after they take it off,” she says. 

The most pressing need right now, Tanielian says, is suicide prevention among veterans, who, depending on their age, are more likely to die by suicide than their nonveteran peers. Day in and day out, she works to identify—and solve—the issues that make veterans uniquely vulnerable to these pressures. 

“How do we help empower them with the tools to be economically successful? How do we ensure that they have stability in their housing? How do we also help support their relationships outside of and within the veteran population? How do we help them store their firearms more safely, because we know that 70 percent of veteran suicides are the result of a firearm, and firearms are the most deadly form of suicide?” 

These are the questions Tanielian asks herself and her team, the questions that drive her work. 

And although that work brings her into contact with some of the most powerful people in the US government (senators, representatives, the president himself), there’s one person Tanielian hasn’t been able to talk with about her work: her dad. 

Leonard Baxter died in 1999, several decades after his military service, but before she joined the RAND Corporation and long before she took up her White House job. 

“My career that’s focused mostly on veterans and military families has come since he passed,” Tanielian says. “But the motivation to do this in honor of those who wore the uniform, and those who made the ultimate sacrifice—he didn’t die in battle, but there are many who did—absolutely, that’s there.”