The forgotten army

‘You see the bright young things marching down the street behind a band but you don’t see the ones who are struggling with a drug and alcohol problem. They are not marching. They are the forgotten army.’

Tony White is company secretary and a former chief executive of the drug and alcohol charity CAIS in north Wales. He is a more outspoken critic of government funding than his colleague and friend Dafydd Jones, who founded CAIS.

Tony wants to see the establishment of a specialist unit for veterans with PTSD but CAIS has already been turned down once, four years ago, when it identified suitable premises in Wrexham.

The Welsh Assembly and health boards said no – ‘partly because they felt PTSD doesn’t exist and partly because they felt that the charity Combat Stress was covering the field.’ Tony has strong views on political attitudes and government funding. The CAIS drug and alcohol unit sited at the Wrexham district general hospital is contracted to take NHS patients and has offered to set up a separate unit specifically for traumatised ex-soldiers.

There is an expectation that the coalition government intends to put new money into veteran care but Tony White has grave doubts about where the money will be going. ‘I fear they will give it to charities who don’t treat the hard end of the problem.’

The ‘hard end’ describes the PTSD patients with associated drug and alcohol problems. ‘These are very difficult patients to treat,’ he acknowledges, ‘and they need specialist services which don’t exist now. These people are suffering and there is no service for them. You see the bright young things marching down the street behind a band but you don’t see the ones who are struggling with drug and alcohol problems. They are not marching. They are the forgotten army.’

Combat Stress excludes patients who are abusing drugs and alcohol, requiring them to attend detoxification services before their own treatment programme can begin (see box).
Tony finds this an implausible requirement. ‘It’s like telling a patient with a broken leg “you have to mend the leg before we can treat you”.’

But his criticism is for government and politicians rather than voluntary treatment agencies. ‘Charities like Combat Stress do a great job but the blame is with government generally and so far the new government is no different. Unless they investigate very thoroughly what they are funding the money will have no effect and will be wasted.’

He attributes the rising awareness of PTSD to increasing knowledge about the condition but also to the changing nature of conflict. ‘It’s a different style to the one our fathers and forefathers knew. They could see the enemy. There were changes in conflicts like Aden, Kenya and Cyprus but the real change happened with Northern Ireland and Iraq, which were far more sinister and this has created more trauma.’

Tony White is in no doubt that the issue of war-damaged service personnel is becoming more pressing. The numbers of ex-service people in prison is underestimated, he feels. The probation officer’s union Napo reported nine per cent of the prison population as ex-military – ‘that’s modest’ – and the MoD figure of three per cent is ‘wildly wrong’, he says. ‘Some do deserve to be in prison but there are a lot of ex-servicemen and women in prison who shouldn’t be there.

‘This is a really big issue – we all know there is a massive problem and the government is totally aware but the moment they acknowledge a problem exists, they will be forced to treat them and it will cost millions.’

Boxed information:

Combat Stress, the ex-services mental health charity, operates a policy of drug and alcohol abstinence in its three residential treatment units. The charity’s website states: ‘We don’t provide a detoxification service. We can, however, help to coordinate detoxification locally, followed by our immediate intervention with bespoke trauma-focused treatment for those suffering from PTSD. The veteran must, however, agree to abstain before being admitted to the treatment programme. Addiction issues and strategies to overcome them will be addressed during their treatment with us.’

A spokesman for Combat Stress told Fox: ‘Our treatment centres are classified as nursing homes and they treat ex-service patients with a variety of mental health problems and we have to maintain an appropriate environment for them.’

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