PTSD:A soldier's story: Fred Doucette

A soldier's story: Fred Doucette's Bosnian war experience helped him to help others
By Kate Malloy
Fred Doucette runs a DND peer support group for soldiers with PTSD.

When Canadian soldier Fred Doucette returned from Bosnia where he had served as a UN peacekeeper in 1995, he was so full of rage that when he finally tried to get some psychiatric help, he felt like ripping out the heart of a military social worker and "shitting in the hole."

A seasoned soldier, Mr. Doucette had been with the UN peacekeeping forces in Cyprus in the 1970s and 1980s. But as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia he was on a "transition mission" and one he says was so horrible he could never have imagined it. As a member of the UN Protection Force, he was under narrow UN orders to help maintain a peace between the warring Bosnian Serb forces from the army of the former Yugoslavia and Bosnia's Muslims and Croats.

But mostly, he says members of the force felt helpless or like "eunuchs in a whorehouse."

"There were things going on there that hadn't been seen since the Second World War, the ethnic cleansing, the atrocities, the rape camps, the concentration camps, it looked like Auschwitz. There were things that were going on and it was just overwhelming to see how they were treating each other," says Mr. Doucette in a recent interview with The Hill Times.

In 2001, Mr. Doucette was diagnosed with severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, and told he could be treated with medical help and psychotherapy after his years of buried rage, nightmares, flashbacks of violence and trauma. He was medically released from the military in 2002.

Today, he works with the Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs Operational Stress Injury Social Support program. He runs peer support groups in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and helps members of the Canadian Forces who have operational stress injuries, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

According to Veterans Affairs Canada's numbers, reported by The Canadian Press, the number of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress has more than tripled since Canada first deployed troops to Afghanistan, and of the 10,252 relatively young male and female veterans with a psychiatric condition, 63 per cent have a post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Operational Stress Injury Social Support group indicates 80 per cent of the operational stress injury casualties are in the Army and 80 per cent of those are from the war in Bosnia. It's estimated 20 per cent of the Canadian Forces have post-traumatic stress disorder today, but the Department of National Defence has not officially released its numbers.
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