GROWING UP IN Detroit under a rough, gruff, blue-collar, beat-cop, short-fused, heel-clack, ramrod-straight code, Ryan Lennon knew his marching orders. Feeling sad? Swallow it. Angry? Channel it. Johnny took your G. I. Joe? Get it back. Leave the couch-moaning, kumbaya, touchy-feely crap to the civilian suckers willing to pay $200 an hour.
So what does Lennon do? He becomes the “psych boss” for the U. S. Navy—a shrink, a therapist. “I know,” Lennon says, chuckling. Okay, he took on the psych-boss role after a few years as a combat engineer; after he made a name for himself playing rugby, turned his carved arms into tattoo sleeves, and, most recently, landed an assignment at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, overseeing the mental health of the legendary 1st Marine Division.
Still. How does this happen to someone raised in a family with men awash in testosterone who look at talk therapy with about as much respect as they would a guy who doesn’t light a lady’s cigarette? Lennon isn’t 100 percent certain himself, but one thing is clear: He’s the perfect guy for the job.
I met Lennon at a Starbucks down the road from the Great Lakes naval station, which lies about 40 miles north of Chicago and is the Navy’s largest training installation and only boot-camp facility. We would have met at his house, but he’s in the process of moving to Camp Pendleton to start his stint with the Marines, so his place, he says sheepishly, is a wreck.
He had also planned to come in uniform but had a change of heart at the last minute—he didn’t want to make me uncomfortable (empathy!) or feel any eyes on him. It didn’t work. At 39 years old, Lennon has a commanding presence. He’s swole, and there’s the ink that crawls up and down his arms, the buzz cut, the square jaw, the sturdy handshake grip, the direct gaze and low-key swagger. He works out a lot: weights and cardio daily, rugby three or four days a week during the season, yoga just as often. He has an open, friendly face and a disarming manner that reads as instantly likable.
Lennon grew up in Ferndale, Michigan, an inner-ring suburb of Detroit. His father, who died in 2021, was an Irish Catholic beat cop powered by the heart of a drill sergeant. “He was a smoker and a drinker and just a hard-edged guy his entire life.” What softness there was came from his mother, a stay-at-home mom.
Early on, Lennon followed the path you might expect: He played sports, he became a leader. At Grand Valley State University outside Grand Rapids, he discovered rugby, a passion that hasn’t faded. “It’s been a mainstay in my life and a source of socialization—a good outlet for me physically but socially as well. I try to harp on the benefits of finding something like that in life. It doesn’t have to be rugby, but you’ve got to find something.”
While still an undergrad, Lennon spoke with an educational counselor and decided to earn his master’s degree in social work at Grand Valley State. Then, as a sort of compromise with his tough-guy upbringing, he joined the Navy at age 27. He spent the first four years as a combat engineer—a fancy title for advanced troops who rapid-build bridges and forward operating bases, sometimes under fire. “We carried a hammer in one hand and a rifle in the other,” he says.
He loved the action, but he was also thinking about the future. Combat engineering is a young man’s game, and he was already over 30. “Then I found out after a few years that the Navy actually uses people who have [social work] degrees and people with backgrounds in mental health. So I just put in a package and got picked up to be a therapist, which is a pretty stark career change.”
Eventually, he found himself aboard the U. S. S. Dwight D. Eisenhower as a counselor in a combat zone for an onboard 5,000-strong crew of male and female sailors and officers. Homesickness was the biggest issue brought to him—especially with first-time deployments. Anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, suicidal thoughts.
“When you get deployed, all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Whoa, this is the real deal.’ It really sinks in. I’m in the military now. You’re being ordered around; you’re working 18 hours a day and not sleeping well because you’re on a big old rusty ship.” Military data shows that the suicide rate among active-duty service members is 77 percent higher than the general U.S. population’s—a point punctuated by stark reports about a series of suicides on the U. S. S. George Washington last year.
Lennon sees it: “You’ve got those guys on the ship that have been deployed three times on the ice in the last three years—and they did a Covid cruise where they had no port of calls, wearing masks all the time. They’re on the same shift for three years, and they’re just burned out.”
Yet the deeper he got into the job, the more Lennon discovered about himself. For starters, he was good at it. His experience in combat zones—and his upbringing—gave him cred among the crew. His education gave him an academic framework. But most key was what he found within himself: empathy, perceptiveness, even sensitivity. Those who came to him were comfortable enough to open up despite their own misgivings, to say nothing of the stigma attached to therapy in the military.
“I know what they’re saying without them saying it,” Lennon says. “Hey, if you told me that you smoked weed on leave, I don’t give a shit. Whatever. It doesn’t matter to me. Let’s get to the heart of what’s going on with you; let’s figure this shit out. You don’t need to feel like you’re talking to the police.”
He also learned to cut to the chase. His type of therapy doesn’t involve years of psychoanalysis—with so many people seeking counsel, “we need to be as impactful as we can in two or three sessions. So we try to get to the crux of the matter quickly.”
His one rule springs directly from his upbringing: No whining. Venting? Yes, but whining, no. The difference? People venting are looking for solutions. People whining just want to dump and moan—echoes of his family upbringing, he says.
Which raised a question I’d had all through my interview with Lennon: What did his tough-guy father think of his son earning a living talking to men about their feelings? “I don’t think he understood it,” Lennon says. But his dad supported him. “He enjoyed the fact that I was making a good career out of it.”
Lennon has certainly done that. After three years of working in a hospital at the Great Lakes naval station, he secured an assignment with one of the premier divisions in all the military: the 1st Marine Division. Hospitals need to be staffed, he acknowledges, but for therapists like him, men of action with combat training and experience, “they need to get us out to the ships and to the submarines and with the expeditionary folks, with the Marines. That’s where we should go, and that’s where we’re going.”
Definitely where he’s going, full speed ahead.
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