My toughest mission was admitting I needed help
The former Royal Marine and TV star tells JANE SYMONS about his battle with mental health issues
IT TAKES extraordinary courage to be dropped behind enemy lines knowing you could return in a body bag, or to swim through miles of inky black water, weighed down by heavy kit and then clamber aboard a target ship not knowing what you will find. Yet for former Royal Marine commando Jason Fox, they were all part of the job he loved, just another day at work.
Jason, better known as the star of Channel 4 shows SAS: Who Dares Wins and Inside The Real Narcos, served in the Special Forces for more than a decade and was sent to some of the most brutal conflicts in recent history. Yet the hardest thing he has ever done was to walk across a sodden sports field in Poole, Dorset and ask a psychiatric nurse for help.
For the first time in a career which began at the age of 16, he was dreading his next tour. It would be some weeks before Jason could acknowledge he had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and would have to leave the job which had been his life for 20 years.
Like so many men struggling with mental illness, Jason, 41, was fearful of showing weakness. He had repeatedly told himself to “man up” and worried about the impact admitting that he had a problem would have on his career and relationships.
It is a dilemma which reaches beyond the Armed Forces and PTSD. One in four people will suffer some form of mental illness in their life and although women are the most likely to be diagnosed, they are also the most ready to seek help. Three out of four people who kill themselves are men and suicide is the most common cause of death in men under 45.
AS JASON soon learnt, there is no quick fix or simple solution to mental health problems. Yet Battle Scars, his breathtakingly honest account of discovery and recovery, is a testament to the importance of taking that first step and admitting you need help.
“Things have improved a lot but even now, there are still people who commit suicide because of the stigma around mental health.”
Service personnel appear to be particularly vulnerable. Three per cent of them have been diagnosed with a mental disorder and a recent study by King’s College London suggests rates of PTSD have risen by 50 per cent in the past decade. Of the homeless people selling The Big Issue, around one in 10 has served in the military.
Jason believes that there are particular pressures and problems associated with the Armed Forces.
“A lot of people join the military because they need that structure. It sounds like a long career but it’s not. I started at 16 and even if I hadn’t been discharged early on medical grounds, I would have left before I was 40.
“That’s still quite young and you have to relearn everything again. Being in the military is like being at university for 20 years and coming out with a degree which doesn’t equip you for employment.”
Yet, as he points out, no one is immune from mental health problems. “It doesn’t really matter what you do, the pressure is still there. Whether you are a CEO or a cleaner you still have pressures.”
Jason was initially prescribed antidepressants and offered cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), a form of psychotherapy specifically developed for PTSD.
The pills provided some relief but the CBT and EMDR seemed to make little difference and it was only after Jason left the military – telling “the brotherhood” who served with him it was because he had tinnitus from years of exposure to gun and shell fire – that he was finally able to face his demons.
In part, this may have been because there was no single trigger for Jason’s PTSD. “In dramas and films it’s always portrayed as someone waking from a nightmare, or jumping at the sound of a car back-firing, Yet it’s not always like that. For me it was an accumulation of stress, a bit like water dripping into a glass – eventually it fills and overflows.” When that happened there were no dramatic nightmares or single moment of realisation, just a “goopy, ominous feeling”.
Jason was also fortunate to have work friends who had seen him struggling and a boss who had served in the Forces and had some understanding of and enormous sympathy for his situation.
A crisis saw Jason standing at the edge of a cliff wondering, “What would it be like to fall?” He then called a work colleague and poured out his fears. Two days later Jason had no memory of the call but his colleague and boss both insisted Jason had another shot at therapy and this time something clicked.
“You have to find the right person to talk to,” he explains. “The first person might not be the right person, no one really knows until they are there, in front of them. It will just feel right. You have to take that leap of faith.” Yet he adds: “Therapists don’t fix things, they just guide you and you fix yourself. Nothing is ever as bad as you think it’s going to be but you have got to want to fix your problems.”
To those who still see that as a sign of weakness, Jason says: “A strong person is someone who knows their weaknesses and knows how to control them, or at least manage them. They know themselves to some degree.”