Ian's Story
Army veteran Ian experienced multiple traumatic incidents during his 24-year service. He pushed away any thought of PTSD until life became too much to bear. Below, he shares how our specialist mental health treatment has helped give him his life back.
Ian always knew he would join the military to follow in the footsteps of other family members. After a brief stint in the RAF, he joined the Army in 1995 in search of adventure and to travel the world. He wanted to learn and so went on every course offered to him and enjoyed playing with “big boy toys”.
During his 24 years in the Army Ian completed a nine-month tour of Iraq in 2005, before serving in Lithuania and Poland. A number of traumatic incidents occurred in Iraq, changing the course of Ian’s life. “It felt like something happened every day,” he says. “I would wake up thinking ‘today is my last day’. I was out on the ground every day in Iraq and the bombings and shootings were constant.”
One of Ian’s most harrowing moments in Iraq was finding a very close friend after he took his own life. “That broke me,” Ian says. “We would speak every day and he was only a week away from going home to his wife and children. I was in denial at the time though. I thought ‘it’s a dream. I'll wake up and he won't be dead’. His face when I found him still haunts me, it’s imprinted on my memory like a tattoo.”
Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) symptoms started to creep into Ian’s life when he returned from Iraq. “When you come home from a tour you get time off,” he says. “I was off for two months and I had nothing to do, so things started creeping into my head. I’d have vivid flashbacks and hypervigilance. I'd lose time too - I'd be watching the TV or reading a book and I'd forget where I was. Then the film would finish and I’d have lost half an hour somewhere. My brain just switched off.”
Ian continued in the Army, brushing aside his symptoms for years and refusing to talk to anyone about them. “I always said I was fine,” he says. “I was in proper denial even when people around me were going ‘mate, your head’s in a mess’.”
Things escalated over a number of years until 2015, when Ian’s symptoms became even more distressing. “If an alarm went off, I’d dive on the floor,” he says. “If I heard sirens then my hypervigilance would kick in straight away. I’d be walking down the street scanning everybody, left to right. I do a lot of walking and I'd stop suddenly to look around and see if anyone was following me. But I totally ignored my symptoms, thinking ‘I'm all right. There's nothing wrong with me’ even though people were telling me I wasn’t.
“It’s only now I’m in a good place that I can look back and realise how bad things were. I can see it now - but I had no idea then.”
Ian carried on like this for two more years until 2017, when he realised he needed help and called our Helpline on the advice of a friend. “I’d been trying to manage life but was just putting a mask on,” he says. “I’d done my own research into C-PTSD and I ticked every box. So I called Combat Stress.”
Ian started treatment and over the next few years took part in group treatment sessions and 1:1 CBT sessions with one of our highly trained clinicians. He also took part in our Live Your Life group, which aims to encourage veterans to manage their mental health independently ahead of being discharged.
He has now completed treatment and describes himself as someone very different. “I'm a more gentle, caring person than I was,” he says. “I can communicate with people now and want to stop to talk to people. Before, I’d go shopping at 4am to avoid people and was like, ‘I don't want to talk to you. Go away’ and that was that. I'm still a bit jumpy with car alarms going off, but not anything like before. Every aspect of my life has improved.”
Ian has picked up new hobbies as part of his new lease of life. “I get out and do things now, things that I wouldn't have done before Combat Stress,” he says. “I have singing lessons, I go for voice coaching lessons, I play the banjo. I go to the allotments and to the gardening club. Before, if I was asked to do any of these things I’d have said ‘don’t be stupid’. So that's a big change – I will literally have a go at anything now.”
“The staff at Combat Stress do a fantastic job. If it wasn’t for them, I’d be an alcoholic, a drug user, homeless, in jail or dead. They’ve helped me to readjust my mind to understand myself – I’d call my treatment life-changing.”
September 25