When Jeff Yarvis began his studies in social work, he had never even heard of the role that would form the core of his 34-year Army career.
Yarvis PhD ’04, a licensed clinical social worker, built that career at the intersection of the military and mental health. The two interests collided in 1993 while Yarvis was completing his graduate degree in social work and met an Army social worker for the first time.
“I had no idea that the Army had social workers,” says Yarvis, who retired as a colonel in 2021. “I got the opportunity to combine the two things I wanted to do. A month out of graduate school, I got deployed with my first unit as a combat social worker, and I fell in love with all of it.”
Over the next decade, Yarvis completed several deployments and earned numerous decorations including the Bronze Star and Combat Action Badge. He also earned two additional academic degrees, got married, and had two children. In the meantime, Yarvis was presented with the opportunity to get his doctoral degree in social work, paid for by the Army. By this point, he had found his niche in providing mental health services and support to soldiers.
“The U.S. military is a representative sample of the U.S.,” Yarvis says. “We have all the same problems—scarcity, racism, sexism, even homelessness—that require the skills of a social worker. And I’ve always thought I could have a greater impact from within this system than outside of it.”
Yarvis was drawn to the UGA School of Social Work’s rigorous research, which helped him focus on creating impact from within. A month into his program, 9/11 happened. Suddenly, his thesis topic of PTSD in soldiers became a highly important military focus.
After earning his doctorate in 2004—his sixth academic degree—Yarvis returned to the field and put his research into action, helping to spearhead mental health initiatives across the Armed Forces. That work earned him a Social Work Pioneer honor from the National Association of Social Workers Foundation, the largest membership organization of professional social workers in the world.
All the while, Yarvis remained in the academy, teaching social work at the undergraduate and graduate levels at schools across the country. In 2012, he joined the faculty at the Tulane School of Social Work as a senior professor of practice. His research focused on post-traumatic stress disorder in service members and veterans, and the role of therapy in the lives of active-duty service members. Yarvis turned that research into his first book. In 2020, he released his second book, Combat Social Work, which examines the ways that lessons learned in war can be applied to life outside of a combat zone.
While he remains on the Tulane faculty, Yarvis returned to UGA in 2022 as a part-time instructor in the School of Social Work, where he teaches courses in military social work curriculum that he and colleagues at the Council on Social Work Education spent years developing.
After decades of helping to bring out the best in those around him, Yarvis says that his current role as a full-time academic has been fulfilling. As an onlooker, it’s not surprising. For three decades, it was soldiers and veterans; today, it’s social work students who are undoubtedly inspired by Yarvis’s passion and his lifelong pursuit of it.