As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth year, more and more veterans- often young men - return home and find that settling into civilian life is almost impossible after their frontline experiences. Many suffer from PTSD and too many end up turning to alcohol or even end up taking their own life as a result of their psychological traumas. Families are broken up and children struggle to cope.

PTSD UKRAINE is a cooperation project between Trauma Experts and Psychologists from Ukraine, UK, Germany, Sweden and Denmark. We run training programs for Ukrainian volunteer workers to better enable them to detect early signs of PTSD and other combat related mental issues, so that they can help refer veterans in danger to professional help at an earlier stage. WE also run training programs for Psychologists to enable them to work with combat veterans that suffer mental health issues.

Due to a general lack of funding in Ukraine for these illnesses we rely on donations from volunteers to conduct training sessions, help cover travel costs etc for participants, produce support materials etc. We aim to train 450 Ukrainian volunteers and 150 Ukrainian Psychologists in 2018. To be able to do this, we are dependent on donations and assistance from kind donors.

In the longer run we aim to establish specialist centres in four regional cities (Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro and Kharkiv) where veterans and family members can receive treatment and support free of charge, and assistance to return to civilian life.