Stuart Langridge was a poster boy for the Canadian military. The triathlete and mountain man competitor served in Bosnia and Afghanistan, where he won two commander's coins.
He was rated as a "superb" soldier in performance reviews and fast-tracked for promotion, acing tests for advancement to master corporal, according to his father, Shaun Fynes.
But after returning to Canada, Langridge fell into a spiral of post-traumatic stress, heavy drinking and cocaine use. He hung himself at Canadian Forces Base Edmonton in 2008.
Today, Langridge is a poster boy for the Canadian military's seeming indifference to the many men and women in uniform who struggle with the trauma of war, said Fynes, who lives in Victoria.
"They just pushed him right over the edge. After Stuart died, everyone ran for cover," Fynes said.
Despite six suicide attempts, the military didn't offer Langridge adequate treatment, he said. Medical records show his son was afraid to talk about his trauma because he feared career ramifications.
And when he checked himself into a rehab clinic for his substance abuse, the military ordered him to leave before the treatment was finished. Ten days later, he was dead.
"They are callous and don't care about the young men and women once they are through with them," said Sheila Fynes, Stuart's mother.
"We gave them a whole person, and they gave us back a dead son."
After two years of complaining about how the military did little to help their son and bungled other aspects of his case, Defence Minister Peter McKay and General Walter Natynczyk, the Chief of Defence Staff, both expressed partial apologies to the Fynes in 2010 - though Natynczyk defended the care Langridge received for his post-traumatic stress and substance abuse.
The Military Police Complaints Commission will start a hearing into the case in March.
Stuart Langridge's story is an example of a growing but partially hidden problem among Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan: substance abuse caused by post-traumatic stress.
Many soldiers are turning to substance abuse as a form of self-medication because of the lack of treatment options. PTSD is hard enough to cope with on its own. But combined with substance abuse, it's often an extra-lethal mix.
During the Vietnam War, studies found one in five U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin. And two times more Vietnam vets reportedly died from suicide than the number of U.S. soldiers who died in combat.
But despite precedents like this, the Canadian military has long underestimated the extent of the problem, according to critics, and it has been slow to offer adequate treatment for traumatized soldiers with substance abuse issues. That's left existing services inundated with demand for help.
Just one in three of soldiers who had major substance misuse symptoms after serving in the Afghanistan mission were getting treatment, according to a 2010 Canadian Forces survey.
"The resources in place have been overwhelmed," Shaun Fynes said.
His wife, Sheila, agreed. "There are so many families with problems similar to ours."
Tim Laidler served as a soldier in Afghanistan in 2008. Like Langridge, when he returned to Canada, he found himself struggling with posttraumatic stress and started drinking heavily. "It numbs the pain. We call it self-medication," he said.
Laidler didn't think he had a problem. A friend eventually suggested he attend a session of the Veterans Transition Program, a University of British Columbia-based program that offers group therapy sessions to soldiers coping with trauma. The program was created with funds from the Royal Canadian Legion.
It was only at the session that Laidler realized he had operational stress injury. (OSI is a broad category that includes post-traumatic stress disorder, milder anxiety disorder and depression.)
The program helped him find a new purpose in life - counselling other veterans. He became its operations director and is now studying for his master's degree in psychology.
About one in three of the program's clients have full blown addiction issues - mostly related to alcohol, but also cocaine and pot.
"The overwhelming majority (of the program's clients) have said they used alcohol to self-medicate," he said.
"You often find them burning through their money in bars. That's the saddest part. They're spending their money on alcohol instead of saving for a home. They say, 'I'm so stressed out, I just need this break.'"
The UBC program is one of the few to offer group therapy to soldiers anywhere in Canada and to address substance abuse issues. Some other programs turn soldiers away if they have problems with substance use.
Due to the heavy demand, Laidler is now working to turn the program into a nationwide non-profit, with similar group therapy offered to soldiers in Halifax, Edmonton and an as-yet-determined location in central Canada. The number of spots in Vancouver will also be doubled.
The program gets no money from the Defence Department. It has applied for funds from the military but has yet to hear back.
But even if the expansion goes ahead as planned, the program will only be able to accommodate about 100 soldiers per year.
That appears to be a drop in the bucket compared to the need. The actual rate of drug use in the military isn't clear because soldiers are reluctant to admit using due to possible legal and career repercussions.
Only 2.4 per cent of Canadian troops who served in Kandahar had been diagnosed with substance abuse disorder, according to a Canadian Forces study released last November. (On the other hand, over 17 per cent of troops were diagnosed with a mental health disorder resulting at least in part from their mission.)
Laidler said that number severely under-represents the problem. It takes into account only active soldiers who access Canadian Forces mental health services and were diagnosed with a disorder. Not counted are exsoldiers and those whose substance problems don't qualify as a "disorder."
Also, many soldiers wouldn't risk coming forward in the first place. "There is a huge incentive to hide any issues as being flagged with an addiction is a career stopper," Laidler said.
"Also, confidentiality around medical issues like addiction is not the same as in the civilian world. The military can and does end people's careers based on medical issues like addiction or losing a limb."
Another Canadian Forces survey in 2009 found that one in six soldiers themselves admitted to using drugs in the previous 12 months.
Also, one in four Canadian Army soldiers said they had worked with troops known to be taking illegal drugs in the past year, the survey found. And of soldiers age 18 to 29, one in three said the same thing.
Heavy drinking was an especially big issue. One in two male Canadian Forces members and 30 per cent of women reported drinking more than the recommended maximum of two drinks a day, the survey found. (That's higher than the rates in the Canadian population - 20 per cent for men and 8 per cent for women.)
The military occasionally does random drug tests in an effort to fight substance use. But Shaun Fynes said soldiers know about them beforehand and have time to stop drugs to let them leave their system.
"It was all a big joke. When the drug tests come in, it was supposed to be a big secret, but the nature of the military is that everyone knows," he said.
Wayne Johnson is the captain of a Canadian reserve unit who is now on medical leave due to operational stress injury from serving in Bosnia.
"I dealt with death and dying for two years," he said. "I started to hit the wall and couldn't fall asleep."
Johnson became addicted to NyQuil to help him sleep.
He was eventually able to overcome his addiction on his own and later founded and become director of WoundedWarriors.ca, a non-profit that supports Canadian troops with OSI.
He agreed that the Canadian military underestimates the rates of substance abuse in its ranks. "If you take 10 guys with OSI, it would be fair to say five have a substance abuse problem. Our number is much higher than the Canadian population," he said.
Dr. Greg Lubimiv is on the
front lines trying to keep up with the demand for treatment. He is a psychiatrist and executive director of the Phoenix Centre for Children and Families in Pembroke, Ont.
The centre provides mental health services to children and their families, including addiction treatment. Many of its clients are military families stationed at nearby CFB Petawawa.
Demand for the centre's ser-vices has exploded. In 2006, it had 10 to 12 military families on its caseload at any one time. It's 100 today. Yet, the centre hasn't received any increase in funding to cope with the growing demand.
Military spouses and children also struggle with stress issues when their parents experience trauma in war, leading to more substance abuse among both soldiers and their family members, Lubimiv said.
"Unfortunately, that's their way to manage pain and distress," he said.
Laidler said the demand will only increase for Canadian vets because substance abuse and OSI often take several years to develop.
In Victoria, Sheila Fynes agreed. "The problems they will see have hardly even begun."
She says she wants to publicize the military's handling of her son's situation to try to help other military families in a similar situation.
Some are afraid to challenge the military because they fear losing survivor benefits, she said.
At one point, Fynes said, the military sent Langridge to a treatment centre for substance abuse, but Langridge turned out to be the only soldier at the centre. Most of the other clients were welloff youngsters who couldn't relate to his combat trauma. "I'm not going to talk about my stuff from Afghanistan with those kids," he told his parents.
Problems continued even after Langridge died. The military lost his will and didn't tell his family about his suicide note for 15 months. It also made numerous errors on his death certificate that took $12,000 in legal fees and a year and a half to correct before the family could settle Langridge's estate.
Shaun Fynes believes his son would be alive if the military had given him better care. "He was self-medicating because he wasn't getting proper treatment," he said.
"We lost our son, and they were totally negligent. The soldiers are just not getting the help they deserve."
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
Source: http://noahsarkconsulting.blogspot.com/2012/03/dulling-pain-of-ptsd-by-alex-roslin.html
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