Of the $270,000 that's available as a disability award to soldiers, he's been capped at 58%. That's all he's going to get as a disability award. And they told him he was lucky; they'd never seen anybody get over 58% with PTSD.
To me, that's a characterization of injury/illness, visible/not visible. Basically I'm looking at a life destroyed, a career destroyed. He hasn't lost a limb, but he's lost his mind. What's a prosthetic mind? You can't find one. I don't know what a prosthetic mind would look like. Right now he doesn't have it.
Really, my opinion is that they're trying to stabilize him so that they can shift him over to VAC. Give him his 3(b) medical release, give him 75% for two years, and then he's off the books. If he commits suicide outside of the military, it doesn't fall on their books. And lots have committed suicide outside of the military: 22 have killed themselves in Petawawa in the last three years.
I'm not trying to be critical. I'm just saying that they don't know how to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. They know how to splint, they know prostheses, they know this, and they know that. But they don't know...and it shocks me. My grandfather came back from World War I and never worked again. He died an alcoholic at Westminster hospital in London. What did he have? He had shell shock.
You know, we've been fighting wars for a hundred years, but we can't figure out how to treat these guys. We can give them crutches. We can do this or that with a visible injury, but we don't know how....
That's why, I believe, the MOs fall back on addiction, why they say it's addiction: here are some more pills; take some Seroquel, Jon, 400 milligrams.
But that will knock you on your butt. That will take down a horse. When he takes them, he stays up three more hours.