Parents help son fight despair

ELLEN CARROLL can’t get the Friday night that changed her life forever out of her head.

Something about the conversation with son Thomas, 34, that evening troubled her and, unable to sleep, she got up and looked at his Facebook page.

She read his new post revealing how he’d stood on top of a cliff three years previously, preparing to throw himself off.

“There he was telling the world all about his suicidal thoughts and how he couldn’t tell those closest to him,” Anstruther gran Ellen, 60, told The Sunday Post.

“I asked my husband to tell me if was dreaming it or if it was some terrible nightmare.

“Even now I struggle every time I think of it. I blame myself for not knowing. What kind of mother doesn’t know her son has reached that depth of despair? Did I blink and miss my son wanting to take his own life?”

Former squaddie Thomas had been driven to the brink by the post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after the hor- rors he’d seen during military service in Iraq.

Now he’s desperate to help others – so he’s setting up a horse therapy centre in Perthshire called Warrior Ranch. And Ellen and husband Harry are putting all their savings into the centre.

“We can’t see him go back to that dark place,” says Ellen.

“Crazy” and “loveable” are the two words Ellen uses to describe a young Thomas.

“He didn’t like school and he always wanted things donehisway,buthewasn’ta bad lad. He’d give you his last 10 pence if he had it.”

Dad Harry, 63, is now retired after a lifetime in the RAF and big brother Robert also joined the RAF. But it was the British Army that drew Thomas and he served for six years, including a tour of Iraq.

On leaving, he worked for the UN and then the US government, providing security for the first democratic elections in Iraq.

“All we ever wanted was for Thomas to go to college and get a good solid trade,” says Ellen. “We wanted an electrician or plumber, instead we got James Bond.”

His dozen years in the military and then private security saw Thomas face death time after time.

Ellen recalls talking to him on the phone only for the line to be lost as a massive

We thought he’d be a plumber... instead we got James Bond.

explosion hit right behind him. She spent hours not knowing if he’d survived.

On another occasion he bent down to pick up a map he’d dropped at the exact moment a bullet hit a fellow soldier in the vehicle instead.

He was also blown up when serving with the Americans, suffering horrendous shrapnel injuries to his back.

“I came home and Harry opened the door and told me. My first words were, ‘Is he dead?’ When he said no, that he was badly injured, I knew we could cope with that.

“Thomas told us later that lying there he felt my mum, his Granny O’Neill, saved his life that day.

“She had always been a massive influence before she died and he said it was as if she was with him, wrapping a blanket round him, telling him he wasn’t going to die.”

For year after year, as Thomas put himself right in the front line, Ellen and Harry faced agonies at home.

“We never got a good night’s sleep,” said Ellen, who spent 20 years working as a manufacturing planner at Quaker Oats before taking early retirement.

“I went to sleep thinking about Thomas and woke up hoping nothing had happened to him.

“You’d hear a bomb had gone off in Baghdad and we didn’t know if he was alive or dead. We’ve got Robert, too, so life goes on but it’s not normal.”