USC students may be left feeling a bit traumatized from the Trojans’ erratic football season thus far, but now the USC School of Social Work will offer a new program to deal specifically with therapy for military families and vets suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. USC officials estimate that 30% of those returning from service in Iraq are expected to seek mental healthcare, considering factors such as Iraq War Army vets showing the highest suicide rate in recorded history. A military trauma specialization will now be offered for those seeking their master’s degree in social work.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The University of Southern California is starting a program to train therapists who understand the difficulties of military families. Starting next fall, the School of Social Work will offer a military specialization within the two-year master's degree program in social work.

"There's been a lot of problems with post-traumatic stress disorder and other kinds of problems returning service members have, and, at the same time, there is a very limited supply of people educated and prepared to deal with these problems," said Marilyn Flynn, the school's dean.

The Army recently contracted with Fayetteville State University in North Carolina to create a social work master's program at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, but the USC program is the first military track based at a university, USC officials said.

The new program will familiarize students with military vernacular, require 600-hour internships in the field, and use the school’s impressive new “virtual humans” technology for practice. The virtual human will be programmed to respond to therapy like a female sergeant who has been sexually assaulted, thus providing students with more realistic therapy simulation than practicing with a classmate attempting to act out a role. USC hopes to soon have 50 to 100 virtual human characters for the social work program.