No section for Military Veterans?

[groovegoddess]

I've just registered and visited the forums and your website for the first time. I am really very concerned that you have no information for currently serving and discharged Military Veterans. I may be female and I may only be 38 years old, but I fall in to this category. I am a survivor of abuse in the Australian Defence Force and I have Major Depression, several Anxiety Disorders, OCD, Panic Disorder and PTSD.

 It's all well and good having shiny, professionally photographed celebrities and sporting identities rating as ambassadors on your pages, but what about those of us who have done the hard yards serving our country??

 It is a huge disappointment to see we don't even rate a mention. How about opening up some portals for Veterans to connect with each at Beyond Blue? Fair enough we can attempt to fit in under "Women" or "Men", but unless you have actually served, others cannot easily identify with or relate to our unique life and work experiences.

[Chris_B]

Hi groovegoddess,

Thanks for the feedback. Resources and assistance for service personnel and their families is definitely a priority area for us and we are taking steps to address these issues in the coming year. At the moment we provide resources and general information on the conditions you mention, as well as links to other organisations and resources currently available. One of these is the PTSD Coach Australia app, developed by the Australian Centre of Posttraumatic Mental Health and specifically made for Australian veterans and personnel serving in the Defence Force. 

We do our best to represent a range of experiences relating to depression and anxiety among our Ambassador stories.  One of our best known Ambassadors is Allan Sparkes, Cross of Valour recipient and former frontline police officer who speaks at length about his experiences with PTSD.  

Groovegoddess your story sounds like it could be valuable to a lot of people. I will start a thread in the 'Trauma' forum for veterans, I hope you will consider sharing your story in it with a view to attracting more, and from there we can look at expanding this into a section.

[white knight]

Hi Groovegoddess,

I've kicked off the first post of the new thread. You are right about it being a world of its own in the ADF.

I really hope we can be of assistance to you as there are many of us here that are supportive.

Cheers for now.

[groovegoddess]

Thanks Chris, I will go take a look at the new thread. I am more than happy to share my story and experiences and can probably find some others who will be willing to share also. 

Cheers Emma 

[white knight]

Hi Groovegoddess,

just be aware that we are heavily moderated here. My post on the new thread might have not got through due to a few words that I wrote.  I dont mind being moderated at all and at times I forget to use other words.  Cheers

[groovegoddess]

LOL! OK 🙂

I guess the use of certain words just makes us passionate...

[Chris_B]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd provide a bit of an update in this thread, as I'm aware it's being linked to from other websites with questions about what's been happening since the original post was made.

Since this post, beyondblue has had a number of conversations with the Australian Defence Force, Department of Veterans Affairs, and other support organisations. What we discovered is that a lot of work is already being funded and carried out by these other organisations; there's little point in doubling up when so many others are already working in the right direction.

We are currently conducting a national research study as part of our Police and Emergency Services Program that will look into finding out rates of PTSD and other common mental health conditions among first responders. Following that, we will be using the findings to work with police and emergency services agencies to identify practical strategies for support.

Coming back to veterans, and why we don't have a dedicated area on the forums.  Since this post was made, we created an area specifically for PTSD, to accomodate demand from users wishing to post about experiences with PTSD from a number of different sources.

We are often asked why we don't have specific sections for different groups in the community, or different mental health conditions, and basically it comes down to demand. Our user research has told us that our members find too many categories to be confusing, and our traffic here used to be spread a lot more thinly across a number of categories that weren't well utilised. Since cutting back on the number of categories, the number of posts and people posting has increased substantially.

The layout of the forums is always under review, and we survey our users annually (some of you reading may have filled out our latest survey which went out about a month ago). If there's enough people posting about a topic to warrant it having its own section, then rest assured we'll open one up. There are already a large number of thriving veterans support groups online in other spaces like Facebook, so it could well be that the reason we don't have more people posting on this topic is that support is already being provided elsewhere.