My slowly assembled headcanon is that Dr. Mehta was a low-level member of the military with medical aspirations, but who had washed out of actual Betan psychological therapist training on ethical grounds. This made her a perfect target for a certain paranoid faction within the Betan was party (whose star was ascendant at that point) who arranged for her (and a number of others in similar circumstances) to get further training and the promise of a secure little government niche in exchange for occasionally following Special Instructions.
She and her cohort were billed to the rest of the service as sort of a stopgap, people given special quick training to be able to effectively triage and field-treat veterans who had seen combat; I might imagine that Beta Colony's psych programs might not have covered military trauma in that much depth during peacetime in a non-militarized society. Therefore special training would have been necessary. The resulting crew would have spotty training, not super good manner while practicing, and would be trained to focus on some of the more extreme possibilities dreamed up by the paranoid military mind rather than the actual problems of the homecoming veteran.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-06-10 08:44 am (UTC)She and her cohort were billed to the rest of the service as sort of a stopgap, people given special quick training to be able to effectively triage and field-treat veterans who had seen combat; I might imagine that Beta Colony's psych programs might not have covered military trauma in that much depth during peacetime in a non-militarized society. Therefore special training would have been necessary. The resulting crew would have spotty training, not super good manner while practicing, and would be trained to focus on some of the more extreme possibilities dreamed up by the paranoid military mind rather than the actual problems of the homecoming veteran.