What the Sunshine Coast Health Centre offers veterans and others

BETTER TIMES: Veterans Matt Staley, a former client at SCHC, and Gord Hoffman on a recent fishing charter.

BY CASEY JORDAN | SUNSHINE COAST HEALTH CENTRE

Our trauma program includes intensive medical, psychiatric, and psychological care in both oneto-one appointments with counsellors and in groups.

The therapies in our trauma program are designed to help a person make sense of their suffering and pain, allowing them to move forward and pursue a meaningful life.

These therapies are also designed to help build self regulation skills to deal with stress, anxiety, anger, depression, detachment, isolation, and other symptoms of trauma.

Trauma cannot be reduced solely to a person’s neurobiology, maladaptive learned behaviours, or environmental conditioning. It affects our fundamental motivations at the level of identity, relationships, personal meaning, and purpose. Trauma treatment at Sunshine Coast Health Centre and Georgia Strait Womens Clinic focuses less on symptom reduction exclusively (which is considered less effective) and instead combines symptom reduction with helping clients pursue personally meaningful lives.

Most treatment centres do not treat addiction issues and PTSD at the same time. Treating one issue while ignoring the other can cause real panic for clients, often leading to them leaving early from the program.

Our clinical and medical teams have worked hard to make sure our addiction treatment program and the trauma program integrate seamlessly.

This prevents clients needing to make sense of conflicting information. For example, standard addiction programming that uses language like “defects of character” often causes overwhelming shame for a professional who used drugs and alcohol as a way to deal with the PTSD they developed as a result of their profession.

We take care to ensure the language we use is not causing confusion or pain.

What today’s Canadian Forces are doing

The Canadian Armed Forces has currently deployed about 2,000 personnel, over 20 global operations.

They include counter-narcotics patrolling in Central America, training security forces in Ukraine, and training soldiers in Iraq and Syria.

There are about 592,000 Canadian Armed Forces veterans.

About 10% of Canada’s war and peacekeeping vets develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.