Stricken with PTSD
Heroes Remember - Canadian Armed forces
Stricken with PTSD
Transcript
You know it’s hard because in those days
when we did missions and we would come
back home we weren’t prepared in advance.
So one day you would have a gun
pointed at you and the next day you are
being shipped back home and
that adrenalin that you had is still there.
How can I manage to get rid of this adrenalin and
come back to a civil way of living,
it’s pretty hard. It’s unbearable.
You know later on in my years
when I had my children;
my children couldn’t do anything around me
because it always startled me.
They always scared me and they never wanted
to bring friends home because
of the way I was acting.
My real self, the real George
always remained over there.
He never came back and something
that my wife says today, she says,
the George that I knew stayed down there;
he never really came back because
of all the suffering I have,
the nightmares that I have.
The fact that we were not prepared.
A psychologist was not seeing us
when we came back or psychiatrists.
We didn’t know how to deal with the atrocities
that we have seen over there.
Just the fact to know that we could find
a way of getting our adrenalin down
would have been sufficient but
it’s hard to come back home.
It’s really hard to come back home.
You see dead bodies - it’s either him or you there.
You look at the person and say well
that could be me right now.
That means my children are home by
themselves with my wife.
It brings lots of thinking and
worrisomes and you think you are
doing good when you come back.
I never knew that I had something wrong with me
until my wife pointed it out to me.
For me I was normal and everything but
for her I was the completely opposite than
what she had known before.
The worst of it all was my children.
They’re the ones that
I find that they have missed a lot.
They have missed, they didn’t get the father
that I wish I would have been.
Go out and play baseball with them and
go out skating with them or going to the zoo.
These are all things that I haven’t done with my
two boys and it hurts me every day.
Even today it hurts me.
Description
Mr. Villeneuve openly shares his personal experiences with his illness and the effect it has had on himself and his family
Meta Data
- Medium:
- Video
- Owner:
- Veterans Affairs Canada
- Recorded:
- November 21, 2013
- Duration:
- 2:00
- Person Interviewed:
- George Villeneuve
- War, Conflict or Mission:
- Canadian Armed Forces
- Location/Theatre:
- Bosnia
- Branch:
- Army
- Units/Ship:
- Royal 22e Régiment
- Rank:
- Corporal
- Occupation:
- Driver
- Date modified: