Thank you.
I sit before you today representing the veterans transition program on behalf of Dr. Marv Westwood, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and Dr. David Kuhl, a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia. They founded the veterans transition program 14 years ago. They started it in a church basement, serving soldiers who had been on peacekeeping missions such as the Medak Pocket, and after that in Cyprus. It was developed at UBC.
Because of their cutting-edge research capabilities they were able to study and learn from these veterans coming home what was actually needed. This program has been going on for quite a number of years. It has finally developed into a ten-day program that's delivered over three months. I want to speak about it in detail.
I am here as both a student in psychology at UBC and a serving member of the Canadian Forces. I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2008 as a corporal and I am still a corporal today. I worked on the front lines in Afghanistan. I know first-hand what it can cost someone to go over there and come back home.
I worked on the front lines there, and I continue to work on the front lines here as the coordinator of the veterans transition program. My job is to get into the communities and recruit veterans who have been living in their basements and struggling, or those who have been surviving just fine working in jobs and careers yet are living lives that are emotionally empty. We talked about the families and wives of military personnel, and this affects not only veterans coming home, but their communities at large.
That is partly why I am excited that this program is funded by communities and the Legion. It's not just military personnel who benefit, but whole communities, when the men and women come home healthy. It's a great opportunity here to take advantage of the resource of Canadian Forces coming home. It's not the case that we have to wait until they are hurting from PTSD so badly that the symptoms require medical intervention. This program offers a proactive approach.
I want to use my own personal example to explain how this proactive approach can be implemented. I came home at 23 and went back to UBC to finish my undergraduate degree. I completed it just fine. It was easy transitioning from working 18-hour days over in Kandahar to coming back to a student life of a couple of classes here and there. I finished my degree on time, and it was great. The problem was that not everything was quite the same inside.
When I went to get my PTSD assessment from the psychiatrist, he said, “You seem to be functioning quite healthily. Sure you have some dreams. You get a little bit angry. Those are things that seem pretty normal for transitioning home. You don't have PTSD. Congratulations.” I shook his hand and thought that was pretty good. I thought I was okay. I walked away from there, and because I didn't have the PTSD diagnosis I was not eligible for any services. On top of it, I didn't want to access any services because I didn't want to admit I was weak. In my eyes, that's what it was. I didn't want to go in front of all of my colleagues and friends and say I wasn't okay, even though they were. I went on for about two years living an emotionally empty life, being high-functioning in society and struggling back at home.
The Legion program came in for me when a friend of mine who works on the program and is a member of my regiment said that I should come to help other people. I said “I could do that. I'm okay. I don't have PTSD. The psychiatrist himself told me, so I'll come into the program.”
Once you come into the community with other military personnel who have been home and gone through that same transition progress, you realize that you can be affected by this. It doesn't make you weak. You can actually go through this program and come out stronger than when you went in.
That's what I really want to highlight about our program. It's different from the other ones out there. It brings people into the community once again. This is work that has been heavily researched by Judith Herman at Harvard University in trauma and recovery. The big component there is that once they address whatever issues may have happened, if they come back into the community the transformation process is long-lasting. When we divvy them up individually to go into one-on-one therapies across all the boards, they start to get the idea, “It's just me. I'm by myself. Maybe it's just me who's crazy.” If you can bring them into a group and everyone can validate their experiences, it truly has a long-lasting effect.
I want to get into the breakdown of our ten-day program, and a little about our national expansion. The program is delivered with a ten-day residential component over three months. They come in together for four days, learn some of the skills, get familiar with what we're trying to teach them, and draw up some of their issues.
They go back into their communities, back into their homes, and they practise new communication skills. They have a chance to tell their stories to their families, often for the first time. It's all very much guided. We do a lot of behavioural rehearsals on the front end.
They come back for another four-day residential component where they get to then debrief how that went for them. On that second four-day component, they get into the trauma work itself and go back and revisit an incident that may have been plaguing them from their service or pre-service.
The last component of the program, after they've dropped the stress injury, is really focused on career. It's focused on the psychological component of career.
To lighten the mood for a moment, there is one of those de-motivational pictures you sometimes see with a caption below it. It has a picture of an operator in Afghanistan, a Canadian member, firing downrange, all in his battle-rattle, looking pretty high-speed. The caption says: “PTSD: coming home and realizing you'll never be this awesome ever again”.
I'm hesitant to use humour with this sort of thing, but that's a huge component. How could you ever diagnose that with a medical diagnostic and statistical manual? It's that trick you play on yourself where you realize, yes, I'm coming back, and the one program they have is from helmets to hard hats. Okay, so I went from being in charge of millions of dollars worth of equipment and numerous people's lives, and I guess I can start on construction, back at the bottom of the seniority list, the bottom of the experience list. How am I ever going to be this fulfilled again?
That's where our program can start to look inwards and find what the core values are, what motivated them to join the Canadian Forces and become such high-functioning members of society, and how they can transition that into the civilian workforce. Not only is there, I believe, a moral obligation to help men and women in this position, but think of the benefit to Canada as a whole society. Perhaps we could actually re-brand Canadian soldiers--not as what was happening down in the States with the Vietnam veterans, where they were labeled as crazy or as needing to be taken care of--and start to see them more as how the World War II veterans were seen, as coming back and being leaders in society, running for political office, holding the leadership positions, and transferring all the valuable skills they had coming back to Canada.
Thank you for your time.