By Terry Nimchuk
I sit with Veterans everyday. They tell me their war stories and we work through their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). From Improvised Explosive Devices to recon, to capture; everything possible on “regular” days in combat situations. Most of them don’t get to my office until many years after the events took place that landed them with me. The time in between is spent spiraling through emotions, thoughts and memories that are terrifying, disruptive and sometimes life ending.
PTSD symptoms are what happens naturally to everyone who survives a traumatic experience. The disorder begins when the person gets stuck in that natural recovery process and some aspect of the event won’t let them move forward. That’s where I come in, sometimes years later, after they have been living in the torment for so long, and after the traumatic event has caused so much more collateral damage then could have ever been predicted.
Its not just nightmares, and sleeplessness that goes on for years; its guilt and shame; and relentless flashes of memories; and having seemingly innocuous stimuli trigger your memory and send you right back in an instant, to the point where you fully believe you are back in that war zone fighting for your life. You are detached and unable to realize that you are home with your family, safe, thousands of miles away from the hell you went through years before.
Truth is, I can’t start to treat PTSD right away. First, we need to deal with everything PTSD has caused to go awry in a Veteran’s life. Relationships suffer, spouses, children, parents, siblings, and friends, everyone in a Serviceman/woman’s life is affected by their PTSD. The fallout from relationships alone can sometimes take longer to address than the PTSD itself. One aspect makes the other worse; it becomes a tangled web of despair.
Isn’t there a way to stop this before it starts? A physical injury gets tended in-theatre; why not a mental one?
Can we deploy a mental health personnel with every medic team? Would this impact the high occurence of PTSD cases seen at Veterans affairs?
Without a doubt.
If a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) member could have immediate access to a mental health professional; trained in trauma and crisis debriefing, and get help for their mental wounds just as they would for any physical wounds, this would greatly decrease the occurrence of PTSD.
The CAF takes amazing physical care of its members while they are in. There are numerous specialists and doctors to take care of the physical damage of war. Medics are everywhere, doctors, trauma surgeons, you name the physical injury and it is taken care of, to a level that we civilians could never appreciate.
The mental health care is there too, however, it is widely viewed as a career ender. If you tell the base doctor that you are suffering from a mental condition such as depression, or PTSD, it is viewed very differently. Current serving members will hide a mental condition out of the fear of what it will do to their career, but what if it never got that far? Why do service personnel have to report to the doctor, but not to mental health personnel to get checked out after any incident?
Right now, to my knowledge, the closest thing soldiers have in combat zones is a Padre, and even those can be few and far between. While many find comfort in a Padre’s services, they are not trained extensively in mental health. They can’t offer these men and women what they need to mitigate the potential onset of PTSD. I was told by a medic that service personnel would seek her out specifically, just because she is a woman and women are viewed to be more compassionate in these situations. Couldn’t we have a well-trained mental health professional there?
I love my work, I honestly do, it is the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life, and I am grateful everyday that these men and women trust me to help them through this immeasurably difficult time of their lives. My sincerest hope is that one day I, and those like me, will no longer be needed.
