Plus ca Change

I’m seeing a therapist . . . again.  It seems that mental health needs a bit of a tune up every now and then.  It all goes back to the same thing, the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that I suffered from the explosion and fire aboard HMCS Kootenay in October 1969.  It did not really show up for about 20 years, and then I became depressed.  I was treated for that for many years and still take medication to prevent a recurrence.  It was not until the winter of 2012 that the depression was attributed to PTSD and hence the Kootenay fire.  But every now and again, I have problems that require further evaluation and therapy.  Thanks to the nice folks at Veterans’ Affairs, I get the treatment at their expense. So I have to admit – I suffer a mental illness.

The other day, I asked this therapist, who has done some study of PTSD, to tell me about it.  He confirmed that it was primarily the symptoms of PTSD that get treated, and in this way, it was hoped that the anxiety that is the heart of PTSD would be alleviated.  So, I asked him if early intervention, such as counselling right after the event, and before any symptoms show up, would help.  He said that such intervention could help to reduce the anxiety underlying the PTSD and thereby lessen the possibility of more serious symptoms showing up later.  Why is this relevant?

The fact is that the symptoms of PTSD; depression, excessive drinking or drug use, marital problems, work problems and suicide; can show up at any time.  It can first show up days or weeks after the trauma, or as in my case, many years later.  After the Kootenay fire, when the term PTSD had not yet been coined, there was no counselling or similar help offered to the men.  No one came to us and said that such help was available.  Mind you, we were in England right after the event, and were there for differing amounts of time, from a couple of weeks to over a month.  But even when back in Halifax, no such help was offered.  And of course, there was the stigma.  The fear that seeking any kind of mental help would lead to release from the military, as happened to at least a few of the survivors.  In one case the release was within a couple of months of him reaching 20 years of service when he would have been eligible for a pension.  Sound familiar?  There is no question that at that time there was a significant stigma against mental illness.

Jump forward more than 40 years to the present.  We are now supposed to know much more about this thing called PTSD.  It has been one of the key findings coming out of recent wars.  The Canadian Forces, along with many of its allies, have tried to come up with strategies to come to grips with this thing and to rehabilitate the sufferers.  But there are too many signs that these strategies are not being too successful.  The number of military and ex-military suicides in Canada this winter is one such sign.  A story in Time Magazine a few weeks ago about a retired (because of the symptoms of PTSD) Sergeant from the US Marines who went on a shooting spree and is now serving 16 years in prison is a sign that Canada is not alone in this problem.  What was interesting about the Time story was that, although the ex-marine had been a marksman and could have easily killed several people, he did not, deliberately aiming to avoid injury to others.  What he really wanted was death by confrontation.

But the thing that really disturbs me is the fact that the stigma of mental illness still persists, most significantly in the armed forces.  Although I have been stigmatized by management in at least one of my civilian jobs.  Everything I read or hear about it only confirms this sad fact.  People have suffered symptoms of what we now call PTSD for as long as people have experienced trauma.  My grandmother used to suffer falls, once down a log stairway, when she heard thunder or a sharp noise because of the trauma of watching her own house being bombed during the Second World War.  Men, who had been heroes in earlier battles, were shot for being cowards when they broke down and could no longer face one more trauma in the First World War.  PTSD has always been with us.  PTSD and its symptoms are not a weakness.  They do not reflect, as it was described in WW2, a “lack of moral fibre”. Why can we not accept this and end the stigma of mental illness.  

Excuse my bad French, but I think the phrase is, “Plus ca change; plus la meme chose”.