Nursing the mental scars of war in UK too little, too late for too many

Nursing the mental scars of war
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 26/11/2007



The Government is unveiling a new scheme to help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But for one widow, it is too little too late, Glenda Cooper finds

'Imagine your worst day and multiply it by a thousand," was how Captain Ken Masters described his time in Basra to his wife Alison. "In Bosnia and Afghanistan I felt I was doing some good. Here it's different."


'Imagine your worst day': Captain Ken Masters killed himself in Iraq
Four days before he was due to leave Iraq he walked into his small barrack room at Waterloo Lines military camp and hanged himself.

"He was out there looking after his men; why was no one looking after him?" his wife asks now.

Capt Masters is one of 17 serving personnel posted to Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed suicide; one in 10 of those who have died in these two conflicts have taken their own lives.

According to the Ministry of Defence's own figures, of 1,158 serving personnel who developed mental health problems - such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), stress-related disturbance and depression - between January and March this year, 499 had been in either Iraq or Afghanistan.



Other figures show that the number of reservists sent to Iraq who suffer mental problems has doubled since 2003.

The last military psychiatric hospital, the Duchess of Kent in Yorkshire, was closed after a review in the 1990s. The MoD says it is accepted as best practice to treat service personnel with mental health disorders in the NHS in conjunction with the Priory group of clinics.

It spent £3.4 million on 307 such patients in 2006-07. However, on Friday the Government announced that it was also unrolling a pilot scheme across six sites in Britain that will provide trained mental health therapists for veterans.

The mental scars of war have always been with us. The veterans of the First World War called the symptoms they brought home shell shock; the Second World War generation talked about "going psycho".

Today, the buzz word is ''post-traumatic stress disorder", a term describing a severe reaction to an extreme psychological trauma.
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