Since the Falklands war over 300 British servicemen have committed suicide – more than were killed in the fighting!
In 1982 Lance Corporal Les Standish received the Military Medal - the third highest award for gallantry in the British Army. 10 years after this honour was bestowed, his life unravelled. He became one of the many - a forgotten hero of the Falklands War - a casualty of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Les earned his living as a bare knuckle fighter and worked as a collector for the local underworld. Then he was imprisoned for months in solitary confinement and spent the time in his cell planning his own suicide. Les was not alone as a PTSD casualty, as many as 10% of people who experience combat develop PTSD.
Sponsor us for only £1 per mile in the London Marathon you’ll pay for a hero to receive one day’s training – on a PTSD programme that really works!
It costs £4,000 to give a hero like Les freedom from PTSD. This pays for 28 days of PTSD recovery training and 5 months of social rehabilitation (less than 10% of this goes into administration costs). That’s less than any other programme. And during the initial development 80% of PTSD casualties were symptom free or able to manage their symptoms by the end of the training.
“I served in the Falklands as a corporal in 2 Para and was diagnosed with PTSD in 1993. Two weeks ago I had a major relapse. I was suicidal and all my memories came flooding back. I couldn’t cope with them. Having done the course my head feels empty. All thoughts and memories I had are completely shredded and I’m sleeping straight through the night which is something I have not done for 25 years. Go in to this training with an open mind. Accept everything that you’re being asked to do because it really does work.”
We need to raise a total of £64,000 by the end of April 2008 to put 16 heroes through the updated training programme. Once this training is complete we’ll be able get the funding to run a large scale project which will help over 100 heroes who suffer every day with PTSD. The project will be independently validated by a leading British University. And with this in place we’ll be able to get the funding we need to help the thousands of veterans who are PTSD casualties.
See what difference this training makes, here: http://web-epics.co.uk/business-video/after-the-falklands/
PTSD is not going away. Every time we deploy our troops into combat more and more are at risk of becoming PTSD casualties. And with over 130,000 troops having served in Iraq and Afghanistan there’s a massive problem coming in the next 5 – 10 years which no one has the resources to cope with.
If you’d like to find out more about PTSD and the devastating affect it’s having on our Heroes, their families and our society visit www.AftertheFalklands.com and download the free resources. And visit www.P3Charity.com to find out the success we’ve had with other social rehabilitation programmes. Or simply contact David Walters or Steve Bradbury.
