A Canadian charity wants to draw attention to psychological wounds suffered by veterans deployed on combat and peacekeeping missions around the world and the toll these invisible injuries have on their families in Canada.
Wounded Warriors Canada (WWC), a non-profit organization created to support wounded veterans and their families, has released a video entitled “Invisible Injuries.”
The haunting video features testimony by Cpl. David McDonald, Lt.-Col. (Ret) Chris Linford and his wife Kathryn, and Senator Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda at the height of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The minute-long video also features some dramatic footage from Paul Gross’s Afghan war drama “Hyena Road.”
Scott Maxwell, executive director of WWC, said he hopes the public service advertisement, produced by Ossington Creative in Toronto, will raise awareness about the significant impact of operational stress injuries like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), affecting thousands of Canadian Armed Forces members, veterans and their families across Canada.
“You would never know that there is anything wrong with them, yet all three men have PTSD,” Maxwell said. “With Remembrance Day now behind us, it is important for Canadians to remember and support our ill and injured Canadian Armed Forces members, veterans and their families, because they deal with it 365 days a year.”
A new report from the Canadian military’s Surgeon General finds an “elevated risk” of suicide among soldiers who have served on the front lines in Afghanistan. Statistics released by Brig.-Gen. Hugh MacKay, which track suicide rates for two decades between 1995 and 2014, flag an emerging trend since 2010 of “significantly higher” suicide rates among army troops who were deployed to Afghanistan.
Over the past 13 years, there were 80 suicides among regular-force male members of the army, compared to 67 in the navy and air force combined.
“There is strong evidence that the CAF mission in Afghanistan has had a powerful impact on the mental health of an important minority of personnel who deployed in support of it,” the report reads.
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