Service Children Support Network - RAF Benevolent Fund

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SCSN I can hardly believe that it’s been 3 months since I last wrote for our SCSN newsletter, time seems to fly by so quickly! So on with the news… We recently extended a warm welcome to our first SCSN Intern, Katherine Grove. She threw herself into all aspects of our work and has even written a number of articles for this edition of the newsletter. She has just graduated from her secondary PGCE course and will leave us at the end of June to take up her first teaching role. We wish her every success in the future, it has been a delight to have her with us. Our spring seminars and training events went very well and it was great to meet so many of you at the Universities of Oxford, Warwick, and Reading and at the Vulnerable Children Conference in Buckinghamshire. We will host a number of other events this summer and autumn and I look forward to meeting many more of you then. I have also attended 2 National Conferences over the past few weeks and both provided much food for thought. The Royal British Legion Stakeholders’ Conference at the start of May encouraged us to reflect on our current challenges and constraints and to look to the future and continue to work in partnership with each other. The SSAFA Additional Needs and Disabilities Conference focused on Service families who have children with additional needs. Hearing families speak about their experiences was both eye-opening and inspirational and while chatting to Mums and Dads over coffee, it was obvious that many families feel that professionals are failing their children. I want to follow up on this and I would really like to hear more from parents and professionals alike. Thank you to all the children who entered our ‘Through the Eyes of a Service Child’ 2012 Photographic Competition. There were so many wonderful entries that it was very tough job for our judges! I hope you enjoy looking at the winning entries later in this edition. Congratulations all 12 winners and I look forward to meeting them at the official presentation in August at the RAF Museum London. Of course I must thank our three judges Jenny Green OBE, Christine Druce and Iain Duncan for giving up their time. On the research front, Dr Grace Clifton, the SCSN Academic & Research Advisor, is working hard on our first SCSN Research Conference which will take place on 10 September at the University of Oxford. Places are filling up quickly so I urge you to book soon as we only have a few places left. We are delighted to announce that the SCSN/Buckinghamshire County Council/Halton School Project has again won funding from the MOD £3M Service Children Fund. This will enable us to extend our Service Children Support Project in Buckinghamshire still further. Our two new ‘Service Children Support Coordinators’ are now fully trained and very busy with their new roles in schools and you can hear directly from them in this issue. I would like to thank the Independent on Sunday for including me in this year’s Happy 100 list and for giving me the chance to further promote the work of SCSN. I would also like to thank the University of Oxford for recognising the contribution of SCSN and the importance of Service Children’s life experiences. It was an enormous privilege to receive a Vice Chancellor’s Civic Award at this year’s ‘Encaenia’ Ceremony and to be honoured alongside some truly inspiring guests including Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. Finally we would love to hear how your Service Children £3M projects are progressing as well as catching up with what’s going on in your area. Please send any newsletter articles and photographs to us using the usual address: contact@servicechildrensupportnetwork.com The closing date for receipt is 20 August 2012.
“Everything will be OK” - One family’s struggle with PTSD. Deborah Harrison, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, who has been researching Canadian military families since 1990, sent us this article by Isabel Angell, NPR News, Washington DC . Deborah says “The article is about William and his family and their struggle with his PTSD. Although William is a Police Officer I think his story has real relevance to Service families living with a loved one with PTSD”. SCSN would like to thank Isabel Angell for allowing us to reprint her article and remind readers that Deborah will be one of the guest speakers at the SCSN Academic Conference that is taking place at Oxford University in September. “Everything Will Be Okay”: One Family’s Struggle With PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) has been getting a lot of attention recently as soldiers return from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But PTSD can also affect civilians. William Edwards developed PTSD after witnessing a fatal shooting while on duty as a police officer in Camarillo, California. His life – and the lives of his family members – has never been the same since. Williams Edwards joined the Camarillo Police Department when he was just 21. He needed a way to support his wife and baby daughter, Dori. He was a good cop, but looking back, he says he doesn’t think he was suited for the profession – perhaps he was too sensitive. The daily hardships of the job had already been catching up with William when he was involved in a shooting while on duty six years ago. That night, a young gang member tried to run William over with his car. Dori remembers that as the night everything changed. William would display extreme mood swings, from being almost catatonic and sitting on the couch unresponsive, to completely disappearing from the house. Dori remembers sometimes she wouldn’t see him for days at a time; she didn’t even know where he was. William says sometimes he lived out of his car and slept in the station parking lot. Today, it bothers him that his fellow officers knew this and didn’t do anything. Even when he tried to seek help at his station, he was denied. “There were several instances where I tried to turn in my badge and my gun and express to my department that I was incapable of returning to work,” he says. “You know, it’s that macho profession and you just put your boots back on and go to work.” Dori says her mother would call the station over and over, even reading them the symptoms for PTSD over the phone from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the professional guide to mental disorders. But nothing happened. “No one would help because they didn’t want that bad rep on their station,” she says. Meanwhile, things kept getting worse for William. “There was no light at the end of the tunnel, there was nothing, it was just darkness,” William says. “And I didn’t see any way out. And that’s when I started to feel like I was absolutely useless to my daughter, to my wife, and I just wanted to release them of that burden.” One time, Dori remembers finding her father in a closet with a gun to his head. She also recalls another time when she and her mother found him about to hang himself in their garage. “That was always one of my biggest fears, that one day I would get the call or I would wake up and he would be gone forever… not just 50 miles away doing who knows what, but that he would just never come back,” Dori says.
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