Foreign Correspondent: Oct 8

Last week Foreign Correspondent presented the story of the doctor and the journalist – as war correspondent Sally Sara met combat doctor Marc Dauphin in a military hospital in Afghanistan in 2009.

In Part 2 of her report, we see how Dr Dauphin, with his wife Christine, is rebuilding his life.

With the right professional help and support from his wife and family, Dr Dauphin is on the road to recovery. Christine says her old husband is almost back to normal – although a part of him will always remain on the tarmac at Kandahar airfield, where his military hospital was based.

“Marc is back. I think this experience showed him that you can recover from war.”
Christine Dauphin

But as the troops pull out of Afghanistan, how many others will return home bearing the invisible wounds of PTSD: post traumatic stress disorder? And of them, how many will overcome the stigma to seek the help they need?

PTSD can hit anyone.

General Romeo Dallaire is one of Canada’s best known soldiers. As commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, he witnessed mass trauma and tells Sally Sara it took ten hard years of therapy for him to want to live again.

Now a senator in the Canadian parliament, he believes one of the best ways to deal with PTSD is to bring it out into the open and change the culture that suppresses and stigmatises it.

“Unless they recognise that this injury is equivalent to any other physical injury, you’ll  never get rid of that stigma and you’re going to be walking around with a bunch of soldiers that are nothing more than time bombs.” General Romeo Dallaire, retired Professor Frank Ochberg, who helped to get PTSD on the books as a diagnosable condition, agrees, telling Sally: “We can learn from the women who have defeated the stigma of breast cancer. You realise, we never used to talk about it. That’s a dead disease; it has changed. We should do the same across the world for PTSD.” Professor Frank Ochberg, PTSD expert.

Tuesday, October 8 at 8pm on ABC1