Fort Carson widows shares heartbreak to spare others

Shelia Olden made the same mistake thousands of others have made when her husband came home changed. She expected him to just "deal with it" and get over it. She didn't know what she was seeing any more than she knew how much he was suffering. She doesn't want others to make the same fatal mistake she made and that, in my book, makes her a hero. Do you understand how much courage it takes for her to talk about all of this?

I get very angry when I am trying to families and warn them about what PTSD is. They tell me they have enough to worry about when their spouse is deployed and when they come back home, there are other things to spend their time doing than learning about a depressing subject. They fail to see that it is their part of the deal to learn. Shelia was like a lot of spouses out there. She didn't want to face it.

If you are one of those spouses out there, read what happened and then do all you can to find out something you can do to save someone you love. You are on the front lines of PTSD. You know them best. If you don't know what they are troubled by, you won't be able to help them heal. If you have already lost someone then take some comfort in the fact that you did the best you could with what you knew at the time.

Army Widow Shares Impact of Suicide

September 16, 2011
Army News Service|by Kerstin Lopez
FORT CARSON, Colo. -- One Fort Carson family knows firsthand the heartache and pain that accompanies a suicide.

Sheila Olden has battled with the aftermath of her husband's suicide. Sgt. 1st Class Brad Olden took his own life Feb. 1, 2010, just after arriving at the Mountain Post and left a slew of unanswered questions behind.

Brad Olden was a seasoned noncommissioned officer with 19 years of service, two deployments in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and on the brink of retirement -- so what happened for him to turn to suicide?

"Slowly and silently it built up over the years and came to a head," Sheila Olden said.

She recalls some of the signs that indicated a problem, but said, at the time, they were hard to notice because she wasn't sure what behavior to watch for.

"In retrospect, I can go back and see mood changes and mood swings. He was not sleeping at night; having anxiety issues and he wasn't putting things into perspective," she said.

Her husband didn't know how to ask to help and bore the burden of his feelings.

"He had a little bit of that mentality -- you are of rank, you've been in the military long enough, deal with it," Sheila Olden said.

Without any notice, Brad Olden left early on a Saturday morning and went to a local sporting goods store to buy a gun and ammunition. After days of worry and searching, his family found him dead in his truck. He drove to Gold Camp Road, an old scenic dirt road that cuts through the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain from Colorado Springs to Victor, where he shot himself.
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