With mental health—and particularly the operational stress injury side of it—you are facing an injury that gets worse with time. If you lose an arm, you know that you've lost it, so the aim is to try to build a prosthesis that will be as effective as possible. If you don't intervene with the same sense of urgency an operational stress injury by recognizing it first and then providing for it, it gets deeper and more difficult to get at and to resolve.
It took four years before I crashed. I lost one of my officers 15 years afterwards and having been treated. So there is a vacuum of how to get at them so that they don't continue to walk around as if they're not injured, without there being a stigma there.
We thought we had broken the stigma by having a veteran armed forces—and we did until not so long ago, but now have a lot more non-veterans in there. We're living what we lived in the fifties. In the fifties we had a lot of veterans, but we had a lot of non-veterans, and there was friction between the two, and they would say, “Oh, I wouldn't be injured like that”. We didn't recognize operational stress injury, so those guys simply drank themselves to death or got out. They were the rubbydubs who died on the streets because we had abandoned them. The exception was the Legion, which did help a lot, but there was also a lot of alcoholism.
We lack the ability to discern them early and to then follow it through in a progressive way.
The first time I went out for treatment, I was given eight sessions. I've been in treatment for 14 years. I still have a psychiatrist and a psychologist. I still take nine pills a day. It keeps me like this.
There are moments, though, like last week. My book was launched in French, and it was catastrophic. Writing those books is like going back to hell. There is no real value to me, but I hope it will be useful to others.
You have to find a way because you need to prevent the injury from getting worse—not just recognizing it, but preventing it from getting worse. Unless you get in there early, it's going to get worse.