early 8,800 Canadian veterans living with operational stress injuries
By Max Harrold
Montreal Gazette
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
MONTREAL — Walking onto a field to relieve himself, Yvan Poisson feels a crunch underfoot. To his horror, it’s a human skeleton.
“I can’t believe I just stepped through a man’s thorax,” he says. “Then, I wake up. It’s a dream.
“But that really happened to me.”
Poisson, 46, a retired air traffic controller with the Canadian Forces, has the dream nearly every night. He experienced the event for real in 1994 while serving in Rwanda during a three-month deployment to restore operations at the airport in Kigali.
His memories haunt him.
They have caused him to drink too much, slip into deep depressions and quit his job.
Poisson is a broken man, one of 8,793 Canadian veterans currently living with operational stress injuries, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, which is characterized by aggression, insomnia, flashbacks and drug and alcohol abuse. Untreated, people with PTSD can become suicidal and dangerous to others.
Since 2002, there has been a startling 411-per-cent increase in the number of veterans diagnosed with operational stress injuries.
The spike in OSI cases is being reported mainly by veterans who served in Canada’s United Nations peacekeeping missions during the 1990s — in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Middle East.
A delayed reaction to the torture and killings they witnessed during their deployment is typical, and helps explain the rise in the number of cases reported now, years after the traumatic incidents, said Lt.-Col. Errol Villeneuve, the Canadian Forces’ senior staff officer for mental health.
As for the military’s current mission in Afghanistan, the deaths of 36 soldiers and one diplomat there last year — the bloodiest year for the military in more than half a century — does not necessarily foretell a new wave of psychologically scarred soldiers from the war-torn country.
Villeneuve said the deployment in Afghanistan is different from peacekeeping missions because this time, the soldiers can fight back. This removes a sense of helplessness many soldiers have felt in the past, Villeneuve said.
But Stephane Guay, director of the trauma study centre at the Louis H. Lafontaine Hospital, is not convinced that being armed reduces the threat of personal injury, a central cause of PTSD.
“Just because you can shoot a weapon doesn’t mean you won’t be harmed,” Guay said.
Canada is now better prepared to welcome traumatized soldiers home.
In April 2006, the New Veterans Charter came into effect. The most sweeping changes to be made to veterans’ benefits in more than 50 years, the charter is designed to ensure the needs of veterans and their families are met. New programs are being implemented to help veterans get better access to counselling, rehabilitation and mental-health care.
By 2009, the Canadian Forces and Veterans Affairs expect to double their mental health staff — psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, addiction counsellors and psychiatric nurses — to 475 across Canada, Villeneuve said. The number of clinics will also grow, from 10 to 13.
Leading the government’s mission to combat operational stress injuries is the Ste. Anne Centre in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Que. The centre is an outpatient clinic for about 330 local veterans and soldiers whose average age is 39, said Raymond Lalonde, the centre’s director.
They come for counselling and support meetings. Veterans’ family members can also receive treatment at the facility.
Opened in 2001, the Ste. Anne Centre sets treatment standards and co-ordinates research for OSI patients at five clinics nationwide. The network includes out-patient clinics run by the federal Veterans Affairs Department in four public hospitals in Calgary, Winnipeg, London, Ont., and Quebec City.
The centre’s leadership role stems from its place within the 475-bed Ste. Anne’s Veterans Hospital, the only remaining hospital operated by the Veteran Affairs department.
Romeo Dallaire, the retired Canadian general and Liberal senator, said he sees the Ste. Anne Centre as a symbol of the change of attitude taking shape within the military and veterans’ health care systems.
“We’re light years ahead of where we were 10 years ago,” Dallaire said.
The former commander of the ill-fated UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda said he is monitoring the implementation of the veterans charter and carefully watching the Conservative government’s handling — and financing — of it.
Dallaire, who brought PTSD out of the shadows and into the national spotlight by recounting his personal battle with PTSD, openly detailing his feelings of guilt, depression and thoughts of suicide after the Rwandan mission, said soldiers and veterans are now made aware of the psychological traumas they might take home from the field.
PTSD “is a sickness and it eats you up,” Dallaire said. “We’re killing ourselves and our families if we don’t deal with it. What we live is an injury. We have to build a prosthesis to pull us through so we can live again.”
Three patients at the Ste. Anne Centre recently shared their stories with the Montreal Gazette to help raise awareness about the debilitating effects of post traumatic stress disorder.
For nine months in 1993, Dejardin was chief of the United Nations Liaison Office in the Gaza Strip, an area now controlled by the Palestinian Authority. His job was to escort UN personnel through various parts of the territory. Dejardin’s wasn’t armed, but he encountered danger nearly everywhere.
“There were daily occurrences of the Israeli Defence Forces (who then controlled the territory) confronting the Intifada, which was basically a lot of young (Palestinian) rebels making trouble for the Israelis by shouting at them, writing slogans on the walls and throwing rocks and bottles at them,” Dejardin said.
“We would be driving along and we would spot a crowd of kids in the street. We would stop and hear the IDF shout at them to disperse. When they didn’t, the Israelis would fire on them,” Dejardin recalled. “One time, I saw a baby, about 18-months-old, get shot. He was in the crowd on the street among the other kids. I rushed over and held him in my arms. An Israeli officer came over and told me to move away. He said this was now a closed military area so I had to leave. There was nobody to give the baby to.
“I had to put the baby down, right there in the street.”
After retiring, “I was kind of a Robin Hood and I wanted to convince my family and friends how one-sided the conflict was. I must have been a real pain in the ass, because I realize (now) both sides in the conflict have their problems. I kept talking about it. I made reports to my bosses at the UN. Nothing. They just told me to be happy I was back here safe and to let others take care of it. My wife and I separated three months after I got back. I became very angry. I started to drink and escape with alcohol. I would often dream about holding a child in my arms, but the child was made of sand.”
Dejardin worked for the army training soldiers using computer-simulated war games until 2002. Dejardin realized he had a recurring short-temper, especially when he drank too much, and he still had nagging thoughts of what he could have done differently in Gaza.
“I got into trouble,” he says, slapping his fist with his hand. “I nearly hit my (new) wife and things got out of hand.”
“I’ve been seeing a psychologist about once a week since 2004, and I meet with a psychiatrist once a month. I took an anger management course. I take eight or nine pills a day, including (an) anti-depressant, a mood stabilizer and a sleeping pill. I’m not completely recovered. But that tough-guy military culture wasn’t helping me. I have to (regularly) talk about it with some other guys like me (in a support group). But besides those nuts, I have no interest in going out and meeting people.”
Arriving on a plane in Mogadishu, Somalia, during that country’s raging civil war in 1993, Thivierge was asked before disembarking if he knew how to handle his rifle.
“I said yes, I’m just a finance clerk but I’ve been to basic training and I know how to shoot. The officer told me to use the end of my rifle to hit people ... when they tried to get up on the truck as we were driving away from the airport.”
Battling Somali warlords would shoot their guns all night to make life difficult for soldiers trying to sleep in Thivierge’s camp that housed 7,000 soldiers from other NATO countries. For the final 21 days of the mission, Thivierge and 150 other Canadian peacekeepers moved to an airstrip surrounded by barbed wire.
“On the last day, we were in our plane for hours waiting for clearance to take off because the Americans were attacking the area from the air. I was just praying our plane wouldn’t get hit. All I know from that time is that everyone causing the problems was black, and that’s when I started to become racist.”
Thivierge admits he still struggles with lingering resentment.
“I know the (black) people I see here are probably not from over there, but I don’t know for sure.”
Upon his return to Canada in 1993, Thivierge worked on and off as a finance clerk for the army reserves.
“I had episodes where I would erupt in anger at every little thing. Like if I was painting a door and my girlfriend noticed a small drip (in the paint), I would say: ‘What you mean?’ Like why is she questioning the quality of my work. Then, I would sand the door down like crazy. When you’re military you’re not supposed to have any faults.”
In 2004, Thivierge was diagnosed with PTSD and given medical disability.
On a vacation to Cuba last year, he relapsed into total panic mode, he said.
“I thought I was over in Somalia again. But (now) I keep going to therapy. I’m doing this interview to let other military guys know that it’s OK to ask for help. There’s a stigma over this. I know guys right now who are having many problems with their families and they don’t want to admit they have post-traumatic stress.”
In July 1994, Poisson left on a mission to reopen Kigali Airport in Rwanda. It was a mission he thought would be exciting and fairly simple to accomplish.
“We had three months to clean up the airport, where there had been many people killed during the genocide only seven or eight weeks earlier. We had to find the books telling us about the airspace, get the radios and navigational aids working again and train the locals to deal with much more traffic.”
While he didn’t witness the genocide, he saw its results and lived through its aftermath. The day he arrived, he was cleaning up a room in the small soccer stadium where his crew of 15 was to be housed. “They had been using the place as a morgue until the week before. There was blood and bodily remains. There were rats that were so big I was really impressed by their size. My first thought was: ‘How am I going to live here for months without ever taking off my boots.’ It was really disgusting.” Kigali had been a thriving city of one million, Poisson said. Now, there were about 10,000 left alive. Driving the 15 kilometres between the stadium and the airport, he saw bones and dismembered bodies piled like litter along the side of the roads.
When he returned from Rwanda in 1994, he felt energized.
“I went back to school and got requalified within months of being back in Canada. I felt so lucky and thankful to be here.”
Poisson returned to his work as an air traffic controller on various Canadian Forces bases. But he soon started to feel unlucky paranoid.
“I was working in Nova Scotia when Swissair flight 111 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean (in 1998). The hangar behind the tower was used as the morgue. Then, I was on a base in Egypt on Sept. 11, 2001. We were locked down on the base and it was very tense for about three weeks.”
In 2003, Poisson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Since then, he has been seeing a therapist and attending support group meetings.
“I’ve learned to live with these things that I’ve seen. I avoid triggers like crowds and any altercation because my fuse is extremely short. I double and triple lock the doors.”
Poissant says he does not regret his military career, but he realizes now that he should have sought psychological treatment earlier, or left the service.
“When you go to the recruiting centre, before you even have your first hair cut yet, you do an allegiance to the Queen and to her descendants. In other words, I will do as I’m told. I give you an oath that I will carry out the mission you give me. And the day you’re not able to fulfill that part of the contract is the day you have to get out.”
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