‘We train them to kill but we expect them to be normal’
Dafydd Alun Jones, consultant psychiatrist, has spent thirty years treating the soldiers, who have been traumatised by their experience of conflict
In 1981 consultant psychiatrist Dafydd Alun Jones had a referral from a GP to his clinic in Dolgellau, Wales. The patient had been pensioned out of his family firm suffering from depression and alcoholism. The story that emerged was one of trauma lasting decades. The man had been shot down over Holland in the second world war during a night mission, survived and made it almost to the Pyrenees before being captured and subsequently ill-treated.
That case set Dafydd Jones on a long campaigning journey. At the time of the referral, little was known about long term traumatic stress conditions, but it was clear to the psychiatrist that his patient had been in a continuous state of trauma since his wartime experience.
Now 80, Dafydd Jones is still treating ex-service men and women but mainly funding the treatment himself – his work has been dogged by lack of funding and government support.
In 1990 he set up a specialised in-patient unit to treat veterans in Llandudno called Ty Gwyn. The unit was unique in that it took the most severe PTSD patients, often with drug and alcohol addiction problems. It was also unique in its funding arrangements – one of the first examples of ‘extra contractual referrals’ in the NHS in the early 1990s.
‘I jumped in at the start,’ says Dafydd Jones. Local health boards and authorities from across the UK referred there, meaning that funding had to be argued afresh in each case, a time-consuming and frustrating process. Eventually, only one in five patients was getting funding approval. ‘Funding was a disaster from the start’, he admits, ‘but therapeutically it was a miracle.’
At Ty Gwyn 600 veterans were helped over five years before the unit was forced to shut in 2005. It was a personal grief for Dafydd Jones that the Welsh Assembly did not save the unit, preferring instead to use the ex-services mental health charity Combat Stress. But Combat Stress does not take veterans suffering PTSD who are not ‘clean’ in their three treatment centres (See box page 11).
With the closure of his unit there is now nowhere comparable in the UK where severely traumatised ex-soldiers with challenging drug, alcohol and behavioural problems can have any meaningful treatment.
‘I was able to use a section of the Mental Health Act (1983) to get ex-servicemen out of jail on bail and into Ty Gwyn,’ says Dafydd Jones, ‘where we were able to help them. There is no specialised unit doing this now.’
Those suffering military-related PTSD do not fit in well with established clinical services. ‘They need sanctuary,’ he says, ‘where they are known and relate. They recoil from big NHS mental health units where they can be intimidating to other patients. Care in the community is no good for them either. They need a community of peers – with other squaddies, military support without the military, where they can get their lives back.
‘At Ty Gwyn we dried them out. Staff were always on hand for them, even if a man came down in the middle of the night needing to talk.’
That Dafydd Jones bonds with mentally scarred war veterans is obvious; his treatment programme helps them unburden the fears they have lived with. That he has fought their corner tenaciously may be the reason for some of the official resistance he has encountered over the years. But he does not lay blame.
‘I am just a clinician and I don’t sit in judgement on anyone. The army isn’t a branch of the social services. We train military people to kill. But then we expect them to be normal.’
There is one aspect of public opinion that does rankle enough for an outburst – the inference that soldiers who get into trouble had behavioural problems before military service. ‘It’s the hymn sheet the Army wants its experts to sing from,’ he says, ‘they say: “we have had no part in the harm done to them.” It’s a calumny and a gross distortion!’
‘I ask the families: “what was he like before recruitment? Was he drinking?” The vast majority wouldn’t have been offending if they hadn’t had this experience.’
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